Societas Christiana

It has been remarked by various scholars that the Gregorian reformation of the eleventh century was essentially an attempt to re-order all of Christian society on a monastic pattern. So dark were the monkish perceptions of the state of Christian society at that time and so unrealistic were their prescriptions for restoration that one bishop is reported to have sarcastically wondered where Gregory VII was going to get the angels to replace the men he was deposing. At any rate, of the aftermath of these monastic-colored reforms especially in England, Frank Barlow writes:

…whereas the water had gone far out in the ninth century and came in majestically and with gathering momentum in the tenth, so that it crashed almost all barriers, the retreat and advance was much less in the eleventh. The unrelieved gloom of the monastic writers is far too black…there seems no good reason why the modern historian should necessarily identify himself with the aims of the reformers and treat with their severity periods which fell short of their ideals. The Church Militant is a society of sinners, and a truer historical tone is achieved if the observer finds himself more at home with the weaker brethren than in the company of those who demanded the impossible. - The English Church 1000-1066: A Constitutional History (London: Longman’s, Green and Co. Ltd., 1963), pg. 27

A bit later, Barlow continues:

The real task of the historian after William of Malmesbury [12th century- TE] is to withstand monastic prejudice in detail, to revalue persons and movements according to their own aims, and to create a new pattern which is not illuminated from a single source of light and distorted by shadows cast by events to come. His task is not to rehabilitate but to reconstruct an age which has been neglected because of its shortcomings, aware that in the long run quiescence is more characteristic - more normal - than revolution in the history of institutions, and that to give all attention to periods of reform and ignore the usual scene is to falsify the past. - Ibid., pg. 28

“Finding yourself more at home with the weaker brethren than in the company of those who demanded the impossible.” “To give all attention to periods of reform and ignore the usual scene is to falsify the past.” Provocative words, these, but timely.

Anglican scholar William Witt explains why he won’t leave Anglicanism for Rome or Orthodoxy. In the midst of his explanation, he gives an interesting summary of James Mozley’s arguments against Newman’s theory of development (see my last post). Mozley thinks Newman commits the elementary logical fallacy of amphibole, by falsely trying to justify a logical argument about disputed facts by appealing to an ambiguous term (”development”). Specifically, Witt summarizes Mozley, Newman fails to distinguish between “Development 1″ and “Development 2.” The former expounds the implications of something clearly taught in the Scriptures, while the latter actually adds new content not contained in the Scriptures. Mozley thinks Newman’s argument is a species of Development 2, and that for this reason it is false to the Christian tradition.

A friend of mine has pointed out recently, the categories of Development 1 and Development 2 seem to nicely parallel Oberman’s “Tradition 1″ and “Tradition 2,” and in this way they add a good bit of strength to a development argument against Catholicism. That is, some of the more important of the specifically Roman Catholic doctrines have come about through the means of appeals to Tradition 2 and, seemingly, Development 2 - which basically means they have (as the Reformation has always contended) swung free of accountability to the Faith and actually added to the deposit of faith rather than faithfully preserved it.

HT: Fides Quaerens Intellectum

James Mozley (1813-1878) was a contemporary of John Henry Newman, and, as a fellow member of the Oxford Movement, he sharply criticized Newman’s move to Catholicism and said that he himself (Mozley) could no more follow Newman to Rome than he could fly. Mozley wrote The Theory of Development: A Criticism of Dr. Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. I haven’t gotten far into it yet, but already it is resonating deeply with me as both an account of the historical progression of the Christian Faith and a critique of John Henry Newman’s theory of development. I may write some more about it as I keep reading, but for now let me commend to you Mozley’s extended argument in the opening pages concerning the “exaggerative” form of corruption. You should read the whole argument for context’s sake, but his summary of it well captures my own view of the problem with Roman Catholic papalism - that is, it is not so much based on bad principles as it is a very exaggerated and immoderate corruption of good principles.

An important point Mozley makes in this regard is that the basic problem with Newman’s theory is not the particular examples he adduces to support it, but the very assumptions of his understanding of development. As in morality, philosophy, poetry, and other areas of human endeavor, Mozley contends that Newman’s principles and expectations of the historical record are immoderate and, thus, as proofs for the papalist system, they well illustrate the universally recognized problem of exaggerative corruption. An interesting point, especially in light of the enormous amount of work that exists concerning the orthodoxy and conservatism of Medieval theories of resistance to absolute kingships.

HT: Fides Quaerens Intellectum

Modern philosophers—and sometimes philosophy in general—have often been charged with speaking in a rarified discourses of their own making, unintelligible to the general public. Here’s what Locke has to say on the subject:

“Nor do I deny that those words and the like are to have their place in the common use of languages that have made them current. It looks like too much affectation wholly to lay them by; and philosophy itself, though it likes not a gaudy dress, yet when it appears in public must have so much complacency as to be clothed in the ordinary fashion and language of the country, so far as it can consist with truth and perspicuity” (Essay, II. xxi. 20).

Now of course, by and large the British empiricists are exempt from this charge—Bacon and Hume more so than Hobbes and Locke (in practice). But here we see Locke rejecting (in theory, at least) the utopic dream of a conceptually transparent philosophical discourse—such as was imagined by Leibniz. For philosophy is not the private domain of gnostics, but intended for the benefit of the public—philosophy must communicate itself through its submission to what Wittgenstein called “ordinary language” (or as Locke puts it, “the ordinary fashion and language of the country”). Hence Locke asserts (in this context) that words like “faculty,” although ambiguous, may—indeed must—be employed, with clarification. Like Plato and Aristotle, Locke works from and along with ordinary language.

In a set of essays to be published this Fall, Au lieu de soi-même (“In [the] Place of the Self”), the French-Catholic postmodern philosopher Jean-Luc Marion turns his formidable intellect away from the ground-breaking Cartesian and Phenomenological studies that have made him famous and toward the Bishop of Hippo. In anticipation of this event, I want to revisit the topic of Augustine and Postmodernism by summarizing and critiquing an article James K.A. Smith published in New Blackfriars a few years ago. The article is called “Confessions of an Existentialist: Reading Augustine after Heidegger” and requires a contextual prelude.

Under the rubric “Augustine and Postmodernism,” we are not concerned with the drivel produced at Villanova’s 1997, Derrida-dominated conference of the same title, but rather with 1) Augustine’s formation of postmodernism’s chief figures, specifically at the birth of phenomenology and existentialism, and 2) the possibility of interpreting Augustine within a postmodern horizon—reading Augustine within postmodernity. I should first like to mention less well-known research on the origin of phenomenology by a French scholar called Alain de Libera. In a recent seminar held at the University of Dallas, de Libera claimed that Franz Brentano, an Augustinian monk and the grandfather of phenomenology, employed Augustinian trinitarian theology in formulating his theory of intentionality. An intention “indwells” (einwohnt) its intended object. According to de Libera, Brentano’s Einwohnung is tacitly underwritten by Augustine’s inhabitatio, the “indwelling” relation of the triune persons. If de Libera is correct (much of his research on the “archeology of the subject” is unpublished as yet), then phenomenology developed its conceptual arsenal against Cartesian subjectivity by assuming the vocabulary and spirit of the relation ontology Augustine had developed (in De Trinitate) against Aristotelian substance-metaphysics.

But now to take up Smith’s essay. He begins by mentioning the important fact of Heidegger’s course on “Augustinus und Neuplatonismus” in the summer semester of 1921 at Freiburg. Scholars like Kisiel and Van Buren have shown that in this close reading of book ten of the Confessions Heidegger began to develop several key themes of the Daseinanalytic—themes such as “care,” “temptation” and “trial”—which would appear prominently six years later in Being and Time. But Smith points out that Heidegger effectively lifted these existential structures from their original theological context in Augustine, whose

“. . . determinate interpretation of factical lived experience is “formalized”—emptied of its determinate (ie., Christian) content in order to distil the ontological structures which it has uncovered. In the language of Sein und Zeit, the existentiell interpretation of experience offered by Augustine is formalized in order to produce an existential interpretation of existence. This project of “formalization” is grounded in Heidegger’s understanding of philosophy as methodologically atheistic” (274).

We might say that Heidegger “neutralized” Augustine’s phenomenology of the “thrown” (or “restless”), “fallen” soul from a relative ethical state to an ontological constant. He did so by rendering the soul “immanent” to itself and its experiential world (Dasein, in der Welt sein) and thus cut off from its transcendent ground in the Creator. Heidegger’s justification for this reading was his hyper-Lutheran dichotomy between “Neoplatonism” and “primal Christian experience” in Augustine. Whereas Heidegger, like Von Harnack, thought that Neoplatonism had distorted the original ‘kerygma’ of God with abstract notions of ontological hierarchy, transcendence and “ascent,” on the contrary any reader of the Confessions can see that the Neoplatonic idiom provided a crucial aid to Augustine’s conversion (bk vii) and framework and vocabulary for the later expression of his theology. Years ago Peter Brown pointed out that Augustine probably didn’t read very much Neoplatonism, possibly just a “handbook” by Victorinus that included some translations of Plotinus. But what he did take from the libri platonicorum was completely reshaped into his own theology, a theology dominated by the Incarnation and the Trinity. If there is “Neoplatonism” in Augustine, it is a distinctly Augustinian Neoplatonism that cannot be extricated from his Christian “experience.”

This critique of Heidegger notwithstanding, Smith believes we can read Augustine profitably through Heideggerian categories. Perhaps we will look farther down this path in a later post.

Speaking of vain, idealistic attempts to literally “rebirth” a past age (as if the intervening time has not really taken place at all), Lynn Thorndike writes:

If, even in our own day, all the resources of the art of history aided by archaeology can give us only a faint and imperfect idea of the past, how can we expect actual renaissances of it or recognize them as
such, if they were to occur? At the age of sixty I am perhaps more like myself at the age of twenty than I am like anyone else. But I couldn’t possibly put myself back into the frame of mind that I had then. I have a dim recollection of it; my present state of mind is an outgrowth of it; that is all. A girl of eighteen, dressed up in the clothes which her grandmother wore when a girl of eighteen, may look more like her grandmother as she was then than her grandmother herself does now. But she will not feel or act as her grandmother felt and acted half a century or more ago. Much more tenuous is the connection between distant historical periods, and much less likely is it that historians can successfully venture upon glittering generalities about them. Who can evoke from the past more than a wraith, a phantasy, a specter, which murmurs, like the ghost in Hamlet, “Historian, remember me!” - “Renaissance or Prenaissance,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Jan., 1943), pg. 66

Later he writes:

The concept of the Italian Renaissance or Prenaissance has in my opinion done a great deal of harm in the past and may continue to do harm in the future. It is too suggestive of a sensational, miraculous, extraordinary, magical, human and intellectual development, like unto the phoenix rising from its ashes after five hundred years. It is contrary to the fact that human nature tends to remain much the same in all times. It has led to a chorus of rhapsodists as to freedom, breadth, soaring ideas, horizons, perspectives, out of fetters and swaddling clothes, and so on. It long discouraged the study of centuries of human development that preceded it, and blinded the French philosophes and revolutionists to the value of medieval political and economic institutions. It has kept men i11 general from recognizing that our life and thought is based more nearly and actually on the middle ages than on distant Greece and Rome, from whom our heritage is more indirect, bookish and sentimental, less institutional, social, religious, even less economic and experimental. - pg. 74

Interesting thoughts.

In his article Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation State Is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,^[1] William Cavanaugh examines the idea held by many Christians today that the State is responsible for protecting the common good. This idea is based in part, says Cavanaugh, on the prior assumption that the state is an original institution of creation. Whether Aristotle’s polis or Aquinas’ regimen principum, Christian political discourse often assumes that human society is structured as a pyramid: “the family is at the base, other groups and associations are in the middle, and the state is at the top to coordinate and protect. The base has “ontological priority” to the state and calls forth the state to be at its
service.” What Cavanaugh finds bothersome about this picture is that generally speaking Christians do not attempt to justify it with historical evidence, but merely assume it to be true. Accordingly, Cavanaugh argues three theses. First, the state is not a natural institution originating in creation, but an artificial one of recent origin. Second, it is the state that creates society, not society that creates the state. Third, the state is not just a part of society, but has in our day become synonymous with society (pg. 244).

To the first point, Cavanaugh argues that the word “state” is often used in a catch-all sense to refer to any form of political organization - a definition which perpetuates the false idea that the state has always been with us. In reality, says Cavanaugh, the state is an invention of the Modern world, having been created during the Renaissance and Reformation, between about 1450 and 1650. The state in this sense is an entity possessing sovereignty within a given territory - that is, within that territory no other authority may challenge the recognized supreme authority. This scheme differs greatly from the pre-modern situation, in which political authority was more personal in nature (feudal, tribal, or monarchical): “If a stranger committed a crime on someone else’s land, it would be necessary to find out to whom he or she owed loyalty in order to know what law applied.” Political communities and processes certainly existed prior to the formation of the state, but they were not called “the state” until very recent times. Further, “The emphasis [of the term state] was on a personalized kind of rule embodied in the prince. Only in the sixteenth century does there arise the concept of an abstract “state” which is independent of both ruler and ruled” (pg. 245).

Another critical development of the modern era is that of the “nation-state,” or “the fusion of the idea of the nation—a unitary system of shared cultural attributes—with the political apparatus of the state.” The establishment of a state in the modern sense of sovereign authority within a given territory gathers together the things we consider matters of culture - such as linguistic, ethnic, and historical sensibilities - and unifies them in a “national” identity. Although the “nation-state” did not emerge until the eighteenth century, some of the important elements of it, such as centralization of governmental apparatus in the persons of the king and his officials, began to gain a firm footing (particularly in England and France) as early as the twelfth century (pp. 246-247). At this point in history, there was no concept as such of “the common good” or of “society” for Europe was fragmented into many societies. Cavanaugh cites Joseph Strayer’s analysis of this phenomenon:

A king of France might send letters on the same day to the count of Flanders, who was definitely his vassal but a very independent and unruly one, to the count of Luxemburg, who was a prince of the Empire but who held a money-fief (a regular, annual pension) of the king of France, and to the king of Sicily, who was certainly ruler of a sovereign state but was also a prince of the French royal house. In such a situation one could hardly distinguish between internal and external affairs. (pg. 248)

Some scholars argue that the distinction between internal and external affairs historically came to be resolved by the creation of the modern state, or “the coercive aggrandizement of [a sovereign central authority]” which used the tool of organized violence (war) to achieve its consolidation. Although the forces which made the modern state were often seeking only their own personal ends, the modern state was one result of their continuous resorting to coercive force. As the example of Tudor England shows, the progressive consolidation of a sovereign, central authority, “the state,” was frequently resisted - the Tudors had to put down popular rebellions in 1489, 1497, 1536, 1547, 1549, and 1553. In this connection, Cavanaugh explains Charles Tilly’s argument that the formation of the modern state should be likened to organized crime’s concept of the protection racket:

the state itself created the threat and then charged its citizens for its reduction. What separated state violence from other kinds of violence was the concept of legitimacy, but legitimacy was based on the ability of state-makers to approximate a monopoly on violence within a given geographical territory. In order to pursue that monopoly, it was necessary for elites to secure access to capital from the local population, which was accomplished in turn either by the direct threat of violence or the guarantee of protection from other kinds of violence. (pp. 249-250)^[2]

This survey gives much empirical evidence for Cavanaugh’s first point that the state is not the protector of the common good, but the creator of that very concept - and that through its control of the means of violence.

To his second point, that it is the state that creates society, not society that creates the state, Cavanaugh writes that in the modern world there is “a shift from ‘complex space’—varied communal contexts with overlapping jurisdictions and levels of authority—to a ’simple space’ characterized by a duality of individual and state.” In other words, “the state ‘creates’ society by replacing the complex overlapping loyalties of medieval societates with one society, bounded by borders and ruled by one sovereign to whom allegiance is owed in a way that trumps all other allegiances.” It is of critical importance to understand that in this scheme law has become a function of will, not reason - that is, the will of the sovereign ruler, the ruler who, within a given territory, is bound by no standards save for those he himself establishes. Politics - as seen in Machiavelli and Hobbes in particular - has become the sheer exercise of power, and all other authorities, including that of the Church, have become subordinated to the state, which has created by will-power the one “society” in which they all live (pp. 251-252).

John Locke adds to the mix. Whereas Hobbes had absorbed the Church into the State, Locke privatizes the Church. Since “Peace would never be attained if essentially undecidable matters such as the end of human life were left open to public debate” (Cavanaugh), the concept of the common good is to be defined as “a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests,” that is, “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like” (Locke). The common good is purely material in nature (pg. 253) - all else (ethics, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and most especially religion) having been locked up inside the private heads and hearts of individuals.

This means that the common good, the center of the society created by the modern state, is economic in nature. Locke’s radical concept of individual rights leads to individual property rights, which in turn, combined with the transformation of perishable goods into imperishable wealt” (i.e., money), creates the idea that anything which is truly common can be so only by the artificial means of a contract. In this scheme, the Church, like all non-material entities, becomes a “voluntary society,” the bonds of which can hold no one who chooses to dissolve them. As one of its most important results, this process means that “The body politic does not pursue a common good, but seeks to liberate the individual to pursue his or her own ends. Contrary to Christian anthropology, the sovereign individual is presented here as the natural—not merely postlapsarian—condition of humankind.” The modern state exists to coercively make sure no one can interfere with anyone else and that all things are reducible to material transactions, but because human interactions cannot truly be purely individual, there is an explosive growth of legal powers and measures to enforce the innumerable and hopelessly contradicting claims of individualistic liberty (pp. 254-255).

To his third point, that “the state is not just a part of society, but has in our day become synonymous with society,” Cavanaugh cites Robert Nisbet’s judgment that “the rise and aggrandizement of political States took place in circumstances of powerful opposition to kinship and other traditional authorities” (pg. 256). “Prior to the rise of the state, central authority was weak and associations strong,” but as the state grew it increasingly absorbed the rights and functions of these associations. Family, village, church, guild, and university each had powers of their own which superseded any claims by the central authority (the king). However, in the modern context the state “came to be seen as the sole source of law, and as the guarantor of property and inheritance rights.” As such, it “took over many of the civil functions formerly belonging to the church, such as the system of ecclesiastical courts. The state claimed a monopoly on the means of coercion and facilitated the enclosure of common lands…In all places, war was the principal means by which the growth of the state advanced” (pp. 256-257). This is because “War requires a direct disciplinary relationship between the individual and the state, and so has served as a powerful solvent of the loyalties of individuals to social groups other than the state (pg. 257). Some empirical data from America alone which is relevant to the relationship of war-making to state-making includes these interesting items: World War I saw a 1000% increase in government spending, World War II saw a tripling of the the size of the government, and the “war on terror” has created the Office of Homeland Security, an agency of 170,000 employees and second in size only to the Pentagon (ibid.).

As Cavanaugh sees it, one major indication of how in modern times civil society has been increasingly absorbed into the state is the collapse of the distinction between politics and economics. Summarizing Charles Lindblom, Cavanugh writes that in our day, “corporate leaders not only buy influence over politicians, regulators, and public opinion, but the business executive him- or herself becomes a type of public official” (pg. 258). Economics makes politics go ’round; one may think here of how easily political leaders get Americans to make often complicated political decisions with long-term ramifications based on the short-term state of the economy: “It is not simply that government has gotten big, and economic and social transactions of every kind must pass through the organs of the state. It is also that the state itself—as well as churches, schools, unions, and other associations has been colonized by the logic of the market” (pg. 259). Perhaps more clearly:

The state is the source of social life. In the absence of a common good or telos, the state can only expand its reach, precisely in order to keep the welter of individuals pursuing their own goods from interfering with each other. Where there is a unitary simple space, pluralism of ends will always be a threat. To solve this threat, the demand will always be to absorb the many into the one. In the absence of shared ends, devotion to the state itself as the end in itself becomes ever more urgent. The result is not true pluralism but an ever-increasing directness of relationship between the individual and the state as the foundation of social interaction. (pg. 260)

In this light it is intriguing to consider that it is the modern state that creates the idea of a “nation” - that is, the idea of “a unitary space and a common history.” In the nineteenth century, the emerging nation-states of Europe expended vast amounts of energy to create within their respective territories “correct” versions of the “common” language, standardized histories and myths about their ancient origins and hereditary rights to the territory they currently occupied - and, further intriguingly, much of this was accomplished by programs of state-organized and state-run national education. The United States did not think of itself as a nation-state until after the Civil War “unified” its previously disparate cultures. Likewise, when “Italy” was created in 1860, only two and a half percent of “Italians” actually spoke “the Italian” language. World War I saw a massive explosion of national identity and national effort. Cavanaugh cites Benedict Anderson’s question about the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: “Why were common people willing to sacrifice their lives for nations their grandparents had never heard of?”, and gives the answer, “The loosing of individuals from traditional forms of community created the possibility and need of a larger, mass substitute for community. Loyalties are gradually transferred from more local types of community to the nation” (pg. 262).

Another significant aspect of the modern nation-state is the appeal by its citizens to their “rights.” The “rights” one is granted by the sovereign modern state further dissolve the bonds one has with the more traditional modes of community such as family, guild, and church, by subsuming all “lesser” concerns under the “higher” concern of loyalty to, and rewards from, the state: “political and civil rights name both the freeing of the individual from traditional types of community and the establishment of regular relations of power between the individual and the state” (ibid). Here appears the theme of Cavanaugh’s article, “killing for the telephone company.” Cavanaugh cites Alasdair MacIntyre:

The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf . . . [I]t is like being asked to die for the telephone company. (pg. 263)

Invoking Aristotelian categories, MacIntyre argues (as Cavanaugh summarizes) that “Integral to the political common good is a distribution of goods that reflect a common mind arrived at by rational deliberation. Rationality in turn depends upon recognition of our fundamental dependence on one another.” Unfortunately, because reason has fallen on hard times in the modern world (will, and therefore, raw power, being the primary focus of modern philosophy), the citizens of nation-states typically do not have any concept of a rational common good. Returning to the collapse of politics into economics, because “the nation-state is an arena of bargaining amongst different group interests,” it follows that “decisions on the distribution of goods are made on the basis of power, which is most often directly related to access to capital” (ibid.).

But even if the citizens understood the concept of rational deliberation for a common end and wanted to put it into practice, “[t]he sheer size of the nation-state precludes genuine rational deliberation; deliberation is carried on by a political elite of lawyers, lobbyists, and other professionals.” The modern nation-state, born from the fires of the Wars of Religion as the way to secure social harmony amongst people whose views of the most important things in life radically diverged, has replaced rational deliberation with mere monetary exchange in a common marketplace. Ironically, then, despite its attempt to downplay class interests and get everyone to participate in “the national interest,” the definition of what is or is not in “the national interest” tends to gravitate toward those who have the most money. Nevertheless, this contradiction is often smoothed over by successful political manipulation of people’s perceptions such that they come to think the differences within their nation are far less important than the differences between their nation and and all other nations (pp. 263-264).

Speaking of money and power:

Capitalism and the state arose simultaneously as, respectively, the economic and political logic of the same movement. The state produced a centralized and regularized legal framework to make mechanisms of contract and private property right possible. The state sanctioned the enclosure of common lands to private use, thus “freeing” landless peasants to become wage laborers. The state directly promoted international trade. The state universalized and guaranteed money, weights, and measures to facilitate exchanges. Taxation became centrally organized under the state, which effectively signified the decline of the land-owning aristocracy and the ascent of the bourgeoisie. Above all, the state contributed, as we have seen, to the creation of “possessive individualism”, the invention of the universal human subject liberated from local ties and free to exchange his or her property and labor with any other individual. (pp. 264-265)

Interestingly, however, the same logic which supports the nation state - the triumph of the universal over the local - has in our day begun to erod the nation-state via globalism. Corporations have in many cases become more powerful than nations as capital has increasingly flowed freely across once supposedly inviolable national boundaries. Nevertheless, the nation state remains powerful - it is still the bearer of the coercive force that is needed to enforce the paradoxically nation-eroding transnational economic standards. Even as government becomes decentralized and disconnected from territorial claims, the basic logic of subsuming the local to the universal continues to hold power. This is, evidently, a “hyperextension” of the logic of the nation-state (pg. 265).

Again following MacIntyre, Cavanaugh writes that while the modern nation is not wholly evil, it simply is not in the business of producing and maintaining the true common good. Indeed, “At its most benign, the nation-state is most realistically likened, as in MacIntyre’s apt metaphor, to the telephone company, a large bureaucratic provider of goods and services that never quite provides value for money.” Further, in Cavanaugh’s own words, “The nation-state is a simulacrum of common life, where false order is parasitical on true order. In a bureaucratic order whose main function is to adjudicate struggles for power between various factions, a sense of unity is produced by the only means possible: sacrifice to false gods in war. The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the Church, meant to save us from division” (pg. 266).

The Church’s response to the nation-state should be to “demystify” it, to begin to treat it the same way it would treat the telephone company. “The Church must constitute itself as an alternative social space, and not simply rely on the nation-state to be its social presence. The Church needs, at every opportunity, to ‘complexify’ space, that is, to promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish.” Two ways this demystification could be implemented are in economics and war. In economics, as suggested in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, Guild-like associations of workmen independent from the state and under the auspices of the Church should be formed (pg. 267). In war, the Church should reclaim her moral authority and persuasiveness to determine when Christians can and cannot kill rather than leaving such decisions to the amoral nation-state. In conclusion:

the Church is not a merely particular association, but participates in the life of the triune God, who is the only good that can be common to all. Through the Eucharist especially, Christians belong to a body that is not only international, and constantly challenges the narrow particularity of national interests, but is also eternal, the Body of Christ, that anticipates the heavenly polity on earth. Salvation history is not a particular subset of human history, but simply is the story of God’s rule— not yet completely legible—over all of history. God’s activity is not, of course, confined to the Church, and the boundaries between the Church and the world are porous and fluid. Nevertheless, the Church needs to take seriously its task of promoting spaces where participation in the common good of God’s life can flourish. (pg. 269)

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At the beginning of the Essay, Locke asserts that the rigorous thinker should follow his own experience and not the theories of others. Of course, this claim is not derived from Locke’s experience but is a trademark of modern thought whose heritage goes back through Descartes to Bacon. But inspite of themselves and their self-confident rhetoric, the moderns persisted in an uneasy dependence on their philosophical forebearers.

Witness, for example, Locke’s chapter on time or “duration” (Essay, XIV), which opens by alluding to St. Augustine: “The answer of a great man, to one who asked what time was, Si non rogas intelligo [“If you don’t ask, I know”] (which amounts to this: The more I set myself to think of it, the less I understand it), might perhaps persuade one that time, which reveals all other things, is itself not to be discovered” (XIV.1).

It is interesting that Locke calls Augustine a “great man,” but neither names him (as the scholastics would) nor submits to his authority on this issue. Instead Locke insists that through careful reflection one may indeed arrive at a “clear and distinct” idea of time or duration. For the “great man” time remains an enigma because it depends on our experience of ourselves, the whole of which exceeds our grasp (“I do not grasp the whole that I am”). I cannot have a “clear and distinct” idea of time because I cannot have such clarity about myself—only God knows me like that.

So Locke appears to mention the (Christian) tradition’s most outstanding thinker on the subject only to sidestep him, just Descartes in the Regulae will introduce familiar terminology only to say that he is giving it “an entirely different meaning from that of the schools.” But despite this apparent lip-service dismissal, Locke’s explanation for time follows essentially Augustinian distentio: “There is another sort of distance, or length, the idea whereof we get not from the permanent parts of space, but from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession. This we call duration . . .” At first Locke appears closer to Aristotle, who thinks time starting from motion in space. But then after his allusion to Augustine, he says that we come to the idea of duration by “reflection” on the “train of ideas which constantly succeed one another in [our] understanding.” In other words, like Augustine, Locke thinks of time in terms of mental, interior space, not like the Bishop of Hippo’s “cavern” but more like a number line: the flattened immanent space of modernity vs. the natural contours of the patristic/medieval cave or house. Locke, under the anxiety of influence that characterizes modern thought in general, disavows or at least cloaks both the Augustinian pedigree and the Cartesian-mathematical episteme of his far-from-“clear and distinct” metaphor for time.

Next, Locke follows Descartes’ temporality of the ego: “For whilst we are thinking or whilst we receive successively several ideas in our minds, we know that we do exist; and so we call the existence or the continuation of the existence of ourselves, or anything else commensurate to the succession of any ideas in our minds, the duration of ourselves or any such other thing co-existing with our thinking” (XIV.3). Although Locke had earlier denied the Cartesian egological deduction of being from thought or consciousness on the grounds that I and the world wouldn’t exist while I am sleeping, here, by working backward through the text, we see that he reduces being for us (“we call”) to the assurance of our own existence, which is a product of thought’s duration (“whilst we are thinking”). Things may indeed exist in themselves (as noumena) but insofar as known (as appearing or ‘phenomenalizing’ to us) they submit to the objectifying dominance of thought’s succession of ideas—that is, to thought’s categorization. Like Descartes and in anticipation of Kant, Locke deploys a mathematicalized Augustinian temporality (succession thought in terms of a ‘number line’ instead of natural progression like the rising of the sun) to reduce the self and the world to the complete grasp of the modern subject. Like Descartes and Bacon, Locke hides his all-too-evident dependence on philosophical authority.

“But where can wisdom be found? Where does understanding dwell? Man does not comprehend its worth; it cannot be found in the land of the living. The deep says, ‘It is not in me’; the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’ It cannot be bought with the finest gold, nor can its price be weighed in silver. It cannot be bought with the gold of Ophir, with precious onyx or sapphires. Neither gold nor crystal can compare with it, nor can it be had for jewels of gold. Coral and jasper are not worthy of mention; the price of wisdom is beyond rubies. The topaz of Cush cannot compare with it; it cannot be bought with pure gold. “Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, concealed even from the birds of the air. Destruction and Death say, ‘Only a rumor of it has reached our ears.’ God understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters, when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm, then he looked at wisdom and appraised it; he confirmed it and tested it. And he said to man, ‘The fear of the Lord - that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.’” (Job 28:12-28)

After the Delphic oracle reported that there was no one in the world wiser than Socrates, Socrates, astonished, decided to test the claim. He went to various sorts of people reputed to be wise - politicians, poets, artisans - and attempted to have it shown that they were far wiser than he. However, in every case he found that those reputed to be wise were really not wise, but had mistaken their proficiency in one chosen area for a general quality of wisdom. The politician, wise in his own eyes and in those of his panderers, wound up hating Socrates for demonstrating his lack of wisdom. “[U]pon the strength of their poetry [the poets] believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise.” Likewise, the artisans “because they were good workmen though that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom” (Apology 21-22). For Socrates, “God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing.” Wisdom consists in a man “know[ing] that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing” (Apology 23).

In the course of his trial, Socrates exclaims, “Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you” (Apology 29). Keeping in mind that the “God” Socrates speaks of is the voice of the Delphic oracle, recall that Job had said “The fear of the Lord - that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.” For Socrates, to cease teaching philosophy, the love of wisdom, would be to dishonor God and embrace evil. Socrates even goes so far as to claim that he is “the gadfly of God,” a gift that God has given the State to arouse and persuade and reproach it as needed (Apology 30-31). From his youth he has heard a voice inside him which “always forbids but never commands [him] to do anything which [he is] going to do” (Apology 31).

The Preacher said, I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:17-18) Certainly Socrates both brought and experienced vexation of spirit, grief, and sorrow. As one reads the dialogues, one sees time and again how the false wisdom of the Sophists continually throws men (sometimes even Socrates himself) into turmoil of soul. Eventually, the claims of false wisdom, the counsels of “the pretenders to wisdom” who advocate only what is expedient for the State’s rulers, cost Socrates his life. And yet, even at the hour of his death Socrates shows a wisdom that parallels biblical categories nicely. To his friend Crito’s attempt to get him out of prison, Socrates argues that one should not try to beat evil by doing evil oneself: “…we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we have suffered from him” (Crito 49). Or, as the Apostle Paul put it centuries later, “Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else” (1 Thess. 5:15).

In facing his death, Socrates also shows wisdom. Having at his trial argued that “no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good” (Apology 29), Socrates later tells his disciples that the reason men may not take their own lives is because they are the possessions of the gods and it would be the height of effrontery for a possession to take its destiny into its own hands without the command of its owners (Phaedo 62). This sparks an intriguing conversation. Cebes asks his teacher to explain how the wise man, who communes with and is ruled by the gods in his pursuit of wisdom, could logically then desire to depart from such a life. The god-given pursuit of wisdom being the wise man’s master on earth, Simmias likewise asks Socrates, “what can be the meaning of a truly wise man wanting to fly away and lightly leave a master who is better than himself?” Socrates answers, “…I ought to be grieved at death, if were not persuaded in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good…I do not grieve as I might have done, for I haev good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead, and as has been said of old, some far better thing for the good than for the evil” (Phaedo 63).

“The real philosopher,” says Socrates, “has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to obtain the greatest good in the other world…[the true philosopher] is always pursuing death and dying; and if this be so, and he has had the desire of death all his life long, why when his time comes should he repine at that which he has always been pursuing and desiring?” (Phaedo 63-64) Centuries later, Paul said it this way: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far…” (Philippians 1:21-23). Where Socrates does not quite measure up to Scripture, however, is in his belief that the philosopher seeks death because it means the dissolution of the connection between soul and body: “He would like, as far as he can, to get away from the body and to turn to the soul,” wherein alone can true knowledge of reality be found (Phaedo 64-65).

By contrast, for Paul the body is an indispensable part of (if I may say it this way) the wise man’s life: “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Cor. 4:10-11). We know that Christ’s death and resurrection was a foretaste of physical redemption (1 Cor. 15:20-21), that the whole physical creation groans in anticipation of its recreation (Rom. 8:22), and that we ourselves are to look forward to the redemption of our bodies (Rom. 8:23-25). For the Christian, then, it is not true that “if we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body” (Phaedo 66). Aristotle was closer to Scripture on this point than Plato.

At any rate, here is another interesting Socratic parallel with Scripture. “Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions? whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? Wars are occasioned by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in the service of the body…” (Phaedo 66). That’s not too much different from “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.” (James 4:1-2) and “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). Again one is struck by Augustine’s idea that with only a change of a few words and phrases, Plato could have been a Christian. Perhaps not always a sound Christian (as with his deprecation of the body), but what Christian is always sound?

In various places in his dialogues, Plato has it that “truth” is “saying what is.” This doesn’t just mean speaking statements that are abstractly the case, but actually making one’s speech match the things that are (or, being). In his Seventh Letter, Plato says that there are five components of knowledge. First are the three things by which knowledge is imparted: names, definitions, and images. Knowledge itself is the fourth thing, namely, “intelligence and right opinion” about the things to which the names, definitions, and images refer. The fifth thing is “the thing itself which is known and truly exists.” Knowledge is right opinion about being, and these things exist in the fifth thing, the soul. Knowledge of the soul is dependent on first having knowledge of the other four things (342a-e).

But here’s the problem: the first four things give only an inadequate understanding of the things in themselves (being), because the first four things are subject to changing conditions of time, history, culture, and other factors. Names of things are conventions; they can change over time. Likewise with definitions, which are “made up of names and verbal forms.” Images of the things are open to “refutation by the senses,” and all of this means that there is a difference between “that which has real being, and that which is only a quality.” This problem “fills, one may say, every man with puzzlement and perplexity” (342e-343c). This teaching is similar to what we find elsewhere in Socrates to the effect that the senses deceive a man and his only recourse for finding truth is to disregard the body: “when does the soul attain truth? - for in attempting to consider anything in company with the body she is obviously deceived,” and “thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and none of these things trouble her…when she takes leave of the body, and has as little as possible to do with it, when she has no bodily sense or desire, but is aspiring after true being” (Phaedo 65).

At any rate, for Socrates, true knowledge, knowledge in the soul of the things that are (being) can only come to the man who has a “well-constituted mind” - only this sort of man can attain to “knowledge of that which is well-constituted.” For if a man is “ill-constituted by nature,” he will not be able to see the truth. Neither a general quickness of learning nor excellent power of memory can suffice for the ill-constituted man to learn the truth, for learning the truth is intimately tied up with a man’s moral character, and moral character, or matters of virtue and vice, “must be learnt, by complete and long and continuous study…[of] the true and the false about all that has real being” (343e-344b).

The end result of the virtuous man’s quest for knowledge will be that “After much effort, as names, definitions, sights, and other data of sense, are brought into contact and friction one with another, in the course of scrutiny and kindly testing by men who proceed by question and answer without ill will, with a sudden flash there shines forth understanding about every problem, and an intelligence whose efforts reach the furthest limits of human powers” (344b).

Now this is fascinating. Plato is not only saying that (1) true knowledge is knowledge of the things that really exist rather than of the things which inadequately try to circumscribe those things, but also that (2) true knowledge is a matter of first having ethical goodness. If you aren’t a good man, you can’t know truth because truth is of what is and what is is good. This reminds me of Richard Weaver’s famous statement that “If the will is wrong, reason only increases mischief.” More importantly, it seems remarkably similar to Scripture’s portrayal of knowledge being a matter of the fear of the Lord (Ps. 111:10) and of having a “spiritual” mind (1 Cor. 2:14). So I take it that if Scripture teaches that there is an antithesis involved in knowing truth, and that that antithesis is fundamentally ethical, then Plato is on this point in agreement with Scripture. Sure, he doesn’t equate being ethical with “fearing the Lord” nor with having “the mind of Christ,” but this is the sort of thing, surely, that prompted Augustine to say that with only a change of a few words and phrases Plato could have been a Christian.

Walter E. Rex in his book Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy (Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1965) makes a sustained argument that throughout the 17th century Calvinist orthodoxy was fundamentally altered by currents of the developing “Age of Reason” which were taken up by many Calvinist polemicists and used as weapons against the Jesuits and other Counter-Reformation forces. One of the most significant alterations that Rex observes occurred with the work of John Cameron (1579-1625). Born in Glasgow, he lived much of his life in France, and became associated with other prominent French Calvinist polemicists, one of whom, Duplessis-Mornay, called him “The Pope of Calvinism” (pg. 10). Rex argues that Cameron was largely responsible for the revivification of Calvinism in France that followed “the stultifying rigidity of the post-Dordrecht conservatives” (pg. 88), and that “his re-thinking of the theological commonplaces set Calvinism on a new path after his death…every important change which occurred in French Calvinism between 1634 and the Revocation [of the Edict of Nantes in 1685] can be traced eventually back to him” (pp. 88-89).

The innovation of Cameron’s that is relevant to the subject of this post is his use of that age’s “faculty psychology”, which was the basis for everything from Descartes’s philosophy of “objectivity” to Pascal’s distinction between “heart” and “reason” to Bishop Bossuet’s oratories in favor of absolute monarchy. Basically, “faculty psychology” divides the human soul (i.e., “the rational soul”, which distinguishes humans from animals) into two “faculties”, the intellect and the will. In the Aristotelian tradition the intellect performed two functions. The first was “seeing” data transferred to it by the senses, and the second was analyzing the data and rendering judgments of truth and falsehood. The will, on the other hand, had only one function: to assent to whatever was presented to it. The traditional conservative Calvinism of Cameron’s day held that in conversion God changed both faculties in two separate actions: first convincing the intellect of His truth and second making the will assent to the truth. Cameron, following a rationalist trajectory, altered this theory by making the will absolutely dependent upon the intellect and then restricting the converting operation of God’s grace to the intellect. This resulted in what Rex describes as “the act of conversion has become centered upon the intellect to a degree unknown in conservative theology” (pg. 93). Faith, for Cameron, presupposes “right reason”–that is, it presupposes infallible intellectual apprehension of truth. As Rex puts it, “It is not faith that seeks understanding, but understanding that produces faith, and reason is the way to truth” (pg. 95).

Cameron thus tied the regeneration of the heart to the total renewal of the intellect. Conversion became primarily the action of the Holy Spirit upon the intellect of a man, which in turn exercised its infallible conviction of rational truth to perform a “moral persuasion” (persuasio moralis) upon the will. Rex goes on to demonstrate from the work of Cameron’s disciple, Moise Amyraut, that this emphasis upon the priority of the intellect (again, based in Cartesian philosophy) was initiated for the main purpose of refuting Counter-Reformation polemicists who were trying to exempt certain disputed dogmas (such as Transubstantiation) from the scope of rational theological inquiry entirely. Thus, although Amyraut agreed generally speaking that no one should ever reduce Christianity to merely what the human mind can comprehend (the extreme to which later skeptics would take the Enlightenment critique of all supernatural religions), he at the same time refused to entirely exempt the doctrines of Christianity from rational demonstration. For instance, while he admitted that reason cannot “directly” comprehend such mysteries as the Trinity and the hypostatic union, nevertheless no one can honestly claim to believe these doctrines if he does not have some sort of rational demonstration of them in his mind–i.e., rational demonstration from Scriptures or from comprehension of necessary rational links between the mysterious doctrines and other less mysterious ones (pp. 99-103).

“With Amyraut, following Cameron,” Rex writes, “…the heart adores because of the force of the demonstration to the intellect, and it is comprehension alone which leads to the acceptance of the mystery.” (pg. 104). This leads Amyraut to a typical Cartesian “foundationalist” theology: namely, he proceeds to build a grand edifice of indubitable rational theology on top of a few self-evident “clear and distinct ideas”. And this theology is infallibly comprehended by the intellect. Ultimately, according to Rex, this Protestantized Cartesian rationalism transfers into the 17th century Calvinist defense of sola Scriptura, turning that doctrine from the relatively straightforward statement that Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith into a principle that actually subordinates Scripture to the “negative authority” of human reason (pg. 111). To sum this up in my own words, this paradoxically makes it possible for these Calvinists to theorize that other authorities (particularly reason) are valid insofar as they agree with Scripture, while in practice actually making the meaning of Scripture co-extensive with Cartesian-style “clear and distinct ideas.”

At any rate, in 1664 a bright young 22 year old named Jean-Robert Chouet was inaugurated to fill a chair of philosophy in the Protestant Academy of Saumur, which had up until that point been defending the old Aristotelian ways against the new ways of Cartesianism being espoused by the Catholic philosophers at their own rival Academy at Notre Dame des Ardilliers. (Note the irony: 17th century Protestants defending “tradition” while their Catholic opponents were defending “novelty.”) Chouet apparently won his way to the chair of philosophy via three weeks of public disputation with many other applicants which culminated in his persuasive (to the other Calvinists at the Academy) demonstration of the superiority of Descartes to Aristotle. One reason that Cartesianism, as demonstrated by Chouet, was so readily accepted by these Calvinists (that is, one reason other than the fact that they already had a rationalistic frame of mind) was that Descartes’s concept of physics seemed to implicitly and decisively uphold the traditional Protestant critique of Transubstantiation. Accepting Cartesianism thus seemed to give the Protestants an edge against their Catholic opponents - a kind of rhetorical “gotcha!” move, that is, using a Catholic philosopher against Catholic theology. A few years later Chouet was induced to teach philosophy instead at the school in Geneva, and it was only a year after he got there and began indoctrinating the Protestant intellectuals in Cartesianism that Pierre Bayle arrived there to study. And as is sketched in my paper on Bayle, it was the Calvinist Bayle who used Cartesianism to devastating effect against all comers and helped to pave the way for the next century of “Enlightenment”.

Given today’s often very superficial treatments of the Reformation’s relationship to Modernity, it is intriguing to note of the 17th century in France that although a big agent who helped the slide into Modernity was a Calvinist, the material which that agent used was Catholic material adopted by Protestants for the purpose of defeating Catholicism. The importance of Rex’s chronicle of all of this early 17th century Calvinistic-Cartesian rationalism is that ultimately it leads to the crisis which the Calvinist Pierre Bayle experienced and to which he applied a rigorous method of skepticism about the ability of human reason to finally prove anything at all, thus requiring the Christian to seek after a “faith founded on the ruins of reason” (see my paper on Bayle, on this website). Bayle, in turn, unwittingly provided the next century’s Enlightenment philosophes (such as Voltaire and Diderot) with an arsenal of skeptical arguments with which to refute not merely Christian truth claims over society, but all claims of supernatural religion. Bayle’s work would also inspire that of the Scottish skeptic David Hume, who declared all treatises about metaphysics and religion to be worthy only of the flames. Hume in turn inspired Kant’s motto “sapere aude!”, “Dare to understand [for yourself]!”– the battlecry of the Enlightenment world in which we all now live.

If Rex’s arguments pan out in terms of his analyses of men such as Cameron and Amyraut and of events such as the Synod of Dordt, it would appear that Calvinists in the 17th century, particularly in France, made significant concessions to the rising tide of Cartesian philosophy which, although originally conceived as a defense for a badly divided and war-torn Christendom, was actually instrumental in bringing about Modern Secularism instead. If these arguments are true, they stand as evidence to a profound tragedy that occurred in the post-Reformation period as a result of the inflexible polarization of Roman Catholic and Protestant forces. All reunification efforts throughout the 16th century and early 17th century having failed, all that was left for Catholics and Protestants was increasingly bitter civil war. And since a house divided against itself cannot stand and nature abhors a [cultural] vacuum, it is really no surprise that the Age of Reason so easily and quickly swept in to rebuild and aggressively occupy the positions of cultural power shattered and abandoned by the Christians of the West.

After a 15 or so page running battle about words with the Sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, Socrates concludes that the problem with the Sophists is that “they cannot be made to understand intermediates.” For the Sophists, words could only mean one thing, and they used this “digital” assumption about meaning to constantly tie their hearers’ minds into intellectual pretzels. Here’s one example that they tried on Socrates:

Then tell me, [Euthydemus] said, do you know anything?

Yes, [Socrates] said, I know many things, but not anything of much importance.

That will do, he said: And would you admit that anything is what it is, and at the same time is not what it is?

Certainly not.

And did you not say that you knew something?

I did.

If you know, you are knowing.

Certainly, of the knowledge which I have.

That makes no difference; - and must you not, if you are knowing, know all things?

Certainly not, I said, for there are many other things which I do not know.

And if you do not know, you are not knowing.

Yes, friend, of that which I do not know.

Still you are not knowing, and you said just now that you were knowing; and therefore you are and are not at the same time, and in reference to the same things. (Euthydemus 293)

Or take this one:

And is Patrocles, [Dionysodorus] said, your brother?

Yes, [Socrates] said, he is my half-brother, the son of my mother, but not of my father.

Then he is and is not your brother.

Not by the same father, my good man, I said, for Chaeredemus was his father, and mine was Sophronicus.

And was Sophronicus a father, and Chaeredemus also?

Yes, I said; the former was my father, and the latter his.

Then, he said, Charedemus is not a father.

He is not my father, I said.

But can a father be other than a father? or are you the same as a stone?

I certainly do not think that I am a stone, I said, though I am afraid that you may prove me to be one.

Are you not other than a stone?

I am.

And being other than a stone, you are not a stone; and being other than gold, you are not gold?

Very true.

And so Charedemus, he said, being other than a father, is not a father?

I suppose that he is not a father, I replied.

For if, said Euthydemus, taking up the argument, Chaeredemus is a father, then Sophronicus, being other than a father, is not a father; and you, Socrates, are without a father. (Euthydemus 298)

Notice that these verbal pretzel can be unwound by simply understanding that the words in question have different meanings when applied to different, but similar objects. The Sophists repeatedly refuse to allow Socrates to inject qualifiers on his use of terms, because Sophistic “wisdom” consisted in precisely the wooden assumption that a word can only mean the same thing all the time, and that people can be shown to be fools and the Sophist to be wise simply by catching them in clever word traps based on the “digital” assumption about meaning.

I wonder if this sort of thing is what Paul, well educated in classical matters, was talking about when he admonished Timothy to “avoid useless disputes about words” which only ruin the hearers and lead to increasing ungodliness (2 Tim. 2:14-17)? I also wonder if it doesn’t have great relevance to the way lots of Reformed people carry on theological disputes about such matters as regeneration, election, who is a Christian, and so forth. Not understanding intermediates, much of contemporary Reformed theology might be classified as an exercise in Sophistic refusal to understand intermediates.

In Canto XXII of the Purgatory, Dante has the pagan historian Statius tell the pagan poet Virgil that he, Virgil, had been instrumental in Statius’ conversion to Christianity. Dante had already noted that like many other great and virtuous pagans (Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, etc.), Virgil himself was forever cut off from God not because of what he did, but because of what he didn’t do. In this connection, Statius notes that Virgil held the light of prefigured Christian truth behind him as he walked, such that while the light didn’t do Virgil himself any good it was of the utmost usefulness to those who followed after him.

I like that metaphor a lot. It seems so much more fruitful a way to deal with unbelieving thought than the type of Reformed “radical antithesis” thought that treats the whole of unbelieving thought like sheer Godless nonsense fit only for being mocked and used as a foil for a supposedly “consistent” Christianity - where consistency is defined by those who advocate it. Remember that those who measure themselves by themselves are not wise (2 Cor. 10:12). By admitting other standards outside of Scripture and outside of our own narrow theological views about what Scripture teaches, we can better avoid the error of measuring ourselves by ourselves and instead make very profitable use of those who held the light of truth behind them, lighting the way for those who came after.

In the first part of this series, we looked at Ernestine van der Wall’s short article on the alliance between Cartesian philosophy and the 17th century school of Reformed theology known as Cocceianism. In this part, we will look at another article by van der Wall. In Orthodoxy and Sceptism in the Early Dutch Enlightenment, van der Wall focuses on the issue of “universal doubt,” the key feature of Cartesian philosophy, and its use by the Dutch Calvinists in the early Enlightenment period.

Van der Wall mentions in her opening pages a point that was made in Part I of this series: the fact that many Christians in the middle of the 17th century thought of Descartes’ philosophy as being an invitation to atheism and a generally irreligious culture. This was due to the fact that Cartesianism, a philosophy aimed at providing certainty, had been founded on the principle of doubt. “Atheists” (a catch-all term in the 17th century, not as specific as its use today) such as Hobbes, Simon, and Spinoza were busy using reason to attack the veracity of Scripture, but many orthodox Christians thought that Descartes had opened room for such attacks, too.^[1] Among the Reformed, Gilbert Voetius (1593-1680) was the major standard bearer of this position. Between Voetius, who despised Cartesianism, and Cocceius, whose principles made great tacit use of Cartesianism, Dutch Calvinists were divided and fought each other for decades in a battle that van der Wall likens to that of the earlier battle over Arminianism.^[2] The Voetians, in fact, openly called the Cocceians the legitimate descendants of Arminius, and they lobbied for a new Synod to expel the Cocceians from the Church as Dordt had the Arminians. This call failed, and the Cocceians wound up eclipsing the Voetians in terms of influence in the Dutch Reformed Church.^[3]

A central feature of the Cocceian-Voetian war was “the relationship between theology and philosophy, so inextricably linked that changes in the one would directly affect the other: new philosophy would bring in new divinity.”^[4] So, while the Voetians held to traditional Aristotelian scholastic philosophical-theology (adapted to Calvinist purposes), the Cocceians, following their master, claimed to have no overt philosophical biases, but only a concern for the teaching and terminology of Scripture. As we saw in the last segment of this series, this was already a Cartesian-like claim - namely, the denial of philosophical heritage and influence in the name of re-building theology from scratch, on the indubitable foundation of the Bible alone. Cocceius himself, when asked about his views on Cartesianism, was reputed to have said that if his ideas seemed similar to Descartes, that was only accidental: he had come up with them himself long before Descartes came on the scene.^[5]

In the year of grace 1666, a work by one Louis Meyers called Philosophia Sanctae Scripturae interpres (Philosophy the Interpreter of Sacred Scripture) appeared on the scene. This work argued that Cartesianism was the only philosophy by which Scripture could be properly interpreted. Reactions among the anti-Cartesian Calvinists were immediate and fierce: Meyer’s book was banned from Holland and Westfriesland along with such anti-Christian works as Hobbes’ Leviathan, Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus, and the Socinian Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum. The Voetians also accused the Cocceians of being rationalists who loved the impious philosophy of a papist Frenchman (Descartes) so much that their loyalty to King and country ought to be questioned.^[6] Into the eighteenth century, many Calvinists continued to polemicize that Cartesianism had produced Spinozism, a clear instance (to them) of the way Descartes’ views encouraged atheism and irreligion.^[7]

Here van der Waal gets into the main theme of her article, the Cocceian-Voetian dispute over Cartesian philosophy’s goal of reaching certainty by the method of doubt. The two factions argued bitterly over this issue and its ramifications for Calvinism:

Was it permissible to apply the Cartesian method of doubt to theology? Would methodical doubt not lead inevitably to sceptical doubt, and this in its turn to a denial of God? Should we accept religious propositions only insofar as they are clear and distinct to us? Might God be called a deceiver? Such matters were hotly debated by Dutch divines and led to a seemlingly interminable stream of tracts and sermons dealing with the effects of Cartesian philosophy upon Calvinist theology.^[8]

In 1669 a discussion was held between the Cocceian Cartesian Petrus Allinga and Herman Witsius about whether doubt was a legitimate means of discovering theological truth. Witsius argued that starting with methodological doubt could only produce “strange novelties” such as impiously doubting God’s existence and imagining that God could deceive us if He so desired. Allinga replied that the term “dubitatio” (doubt) really only meant “to suspend judgment until we have found solid grounds for embracing the truth,” and that the term could not be properly equated with “falsehood.” Further, there should be made a distinction between “to doub” and “persisting in doubt,” the former of which was acceptable for the believer but the latter of which was destructive of faith. For Allinga, doubt was the best way to attack atheism, for merely believing in God’s existence on the word of one’s parents could not compete with actually seeing the truth of God’s existence for oneself - something that the Cartesian method of doubt could accomplish.^[9] “Allinga was convinced that those who did not embrace their religion after a thorough investigation of its fundamental truths would fall into atheism at its first blow. That was why the Cartesian method was so important: it showed the way to certitude.”^[10] Witsius, for his part, continued to maintain that Cartesian doubt was equivalent to accepting the falsehood of what was being doubted, and thus, was the road to atheism.^[11]

Another Voetian minister, Leonardus Rijssenius, attacked Cartesianism’s insistence that even doubting the existence of God in order to rebuild certainty in it via coming to rationally see it as true. This idea involved the shocking consequence of attacking the very authority of God’s Word and making it subject to man’s immanent reason, Rijssenius said: “The Cartesian theologians who believe that [the truth of God’s existence] might only be accepted because man sees a reason to do so imply…that children and simple folk who are unable to undertake such an investigation are not allowed to embrace the truth, and that they may not be told by others what to believe.”^[12] On the contrary, Rijssenius declared (sounding an Augustinian note, it seems), “belief does not require any proofs from nature. Belief precedes all investigation.” Other shocking conclusions which Rijssenius saw in the Cartesian variety of Calvinism was that neither Jews nor Socinians could be held accountable for their heresies, since by “doubting” biblical truth they were excused, on Cartesian grounds, until such time (whenever that might come) as they could rationally see biblical truth to be truth. Rijssenius was among the Voetians who wished the Cocceians to be excommunicated from the Reformed Church in like manner as the Arminians had been at the earlier Synod of Dordt.^[13]

Against these attacks and others like them, Allinga continued to maintain that “doubt” simply did not mean what the anti-Cartesians claimed it meant. According to Allinga, it was wrong to think of doubt as meaning “an ambiguous fluctuation of the mind between certain extremes,” for the truly learned understood that doubt only meant “a suspension of judgement and a close scrutiny of the truth.”^[14]

Van der Wall concludes her article by summing up the central point that both Voetian and Cocceian Calvinists were fighting the same enemy: the rising tide of secularism and irreligion.^[15] The problem was that each understood the danger in its own way, and its own way thought that the other was actually increasing, not decreasing the danger. The Voetians thought that the Cocceians were undermining faith in the Scriptures and in the settled conclusions of Reformed orthodoxy by encouraging the Cartesian method of trying to build certainty atop a foundation of fundamental doubt. The Cocceians, on the other hand, thought that the Voetians were making room for atheism by not allowing assent to the doctrines of the faith to be withheld until they could be rationally, not merely authoritatively, established. Both sides were Calvinist. Both sides believed themselves to be defending the truth claims of Calvinism. But, as van der Wall concludes, through their vehement and bitter decades-long war over Cartesianism’s utility to Calvinism, both sides helped prepard the way for the awesome leveling work of the Calvinist skeptic Pierre Bayle (1647-1706).^[16]

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I’ve been saying for several years now that among popular Calvinist writers and apologists the philosophy of Rene Descartes to no small extent determines how they present Reformed Theology, its relationship to what they call “the plain meaning of Scripture,” and their defenses of Reformed Theology against other views. Interestingly, it’s precisely the prevalence of Cartesianism in the thought of such popularizers that prevents them from seeing the prevalence of Cartesianism in their thought - for Cartesianism, which claims to free the mind from all traditions, can itself be a very blinding tradition. When in 2003 I first started making these arguments I was, admittedly, putting together bits and pieces of analysis which I had found scattered throughout a number of works. I was not entirely sure of the structure and strength of my argument. I am sure that for a time I overplayed my rhetoric in controversies with apologists who have underdeveloped senses of realism about their own grasp of truth relative to other Christian traditions and very little rhetorical moderation. Immoderate rhetoric often calls forth immoderate rhetoric, and sometimes, unfortunately, substance can get buried in the mutual dirt-piling.

However, when in 2004 I set myself to do an extended survey of Descartes (and three other early Modern thinkers, Locke, Hobbes, and Bayle), I felt that I had firmly established the legitimacy of making the argument that much of popular Calvinism is Cartesian. Between Richard Popkin’s A History of Skepticism and Walter Rex’s Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Conflict alone (not mentioning other sources), I was convinced that Cartesianism had had a very serious influence on Calvinist thought, and that pop-Calvinists who opine that their theology has no philosophical influences but “simply” represents the “clear” truth of Scripture are themselves seriously out of touch with reality. I’ve recently had this belief of mine strengthened by several major journal articles on the influence of Cartesianism on early Calvinism. Over the next few days, I’d like to summarize the arguments of these articles.

Cartesianism and Cocceianism: A Natural Alliance?

The name of Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669) is one of those names you just don’t hear much about in pop-Calvinist writings.^[1] He was a major advocate of what is called “federal theology,” including the idea that Scripture shows us a dual covenant scheme of covenant of works (foedus operum) and covenant of grace (foedus gratiae), and in this connection he is sometimes called “the father of covenant theology.”^[2] Apparently, he himself believed he got his theology strictly from the Bible alone.

Ernestine van der Wall discusses the complicated relationship of Cartesian philosophy on the branch of early Reformed theology created by Cocceius.^[3] Between 1650 and 1730, the advocates of Cocceius’ theology carried on a bitter fight with the advocates of another school of Reformed theology, that of Gilbertus Voetius (1593-1680). The pivotal issue of dispute between them was Cartesian philosophy. This was the time when Cartesianism was itself fighting for its right to be heard in an intellectual world still very much afraid of “novelty” and willing, as one contemporary put it rhetorically, “to err with Scripture than be in the right with the moderns.”^[4] Intriguingly, because of its basis in skepticism (douting all things except what could be rationally proven to be indubitable) and its consequent willingness to throw out tradition in favor of individual rational analysis, Cartesian philosophy at this time was widely suspected of laying the groundwork for atheism and irreligious culture.^[5]

Although Cocceius himself claimed that theology should be derived from the Bible alone and although many Cocceians explicitly rejected Cartesianism, the Voetians pressed home time and again the point that the Cocceians were, in fact, Cartesians in disguise. What could have been the reason for this? For one thing, the Cocceians explicitly separated philosophy and theology. They rejected the traditional Christian idea, especially as found in Medieval Scholasticism, that philosophy was the “handmaiden of theology” (ancilla theologiae). As van der Wall writes, the Cocceians held “that philosophy
should not be living together with theology under the same roof. If they, mistress and maid, inhabited the same house, the maid might become ambitious, desiring to be mistress herself.” Consequently, they held that philosophy and theology should be built on separate foundations - philosophy on the foundation of reason, theology on the foundation of divine revelation alone.^[6]

In the context of the polemical need to fight Roman Catholic advocates of Cartesianism, some Cocceian theologians took the idea of the separation of philosophy and theology to mean that they could use the weapons of Descartes to fight the Catholics and the weapons of Cocceius to establish and defend Reformed theology.^[7] One front of this battle, motivated by the growing tide of secular skepticism which was tending to replace natural theology with a natural religion (leading to the position that would soon be called “Deism”) was to strictly separate natural and special revelation. This was done so that philosophy could have little to no input in the theological task. Taking their cues from the skeptics, who were using philosophy as a hammer against religion, many Calvinists feared that “if in the interpretation of the Bible one made use of philosophy Scripture would be easily held in contempt.”^[8]

However, it proved far easier to verbally denigrate the use of philosophy in theology than it did to actually do so. One of the major Cocceian separators of philosophy and theology, Salomon van Til, denied philosophy’s helpfulness to theology with one breath, yet with the next imported several major principles of Cartesian philosophy into his exposition of special revelation: “[van Til’s] notions on God’s existence thus seem to have been inspired by Descartes, as for example the notion that the idea of a highest Being necessarily implies its existence; that the idea of God within man as an absolute and perfect Being can only be derived from our Creator; that the idea of God is placed in man by God.”^[9] Another Cocceian, Petrus Allinga, answered arguments about doubt inspired by the raging debate about Cartesian philosophy this way: “doubt was not to be identified with regarding a thing as untrue, but should be interpreted as suspension of judgement until we see reasons to embrace the truth. Indeed, according to Allinga and other Cocceians, there was no better means of destroying atheism than methodical doubt.” Furthermore, “As to the rule that all the things which we clearly and distinctly conceive are true, Allinga suggested that this was the best criterion for reaching the truth.”^[10] But all of these principles were Cartesian ones, demonstrating that those who with one breath tried to restrict philosophy’s range of movement in theology were very willing in the next to allow it expansive manuevering room. Van der Wall’s next remark is worth quoting in full:

[Allinga] observed that we should not accept anything as true in theology before we conceive clearly and distinctly that it has been revealed by God. God’s Word ought not to be believed without any good reason. While suspending our judgement we should look very carefully for the arguments for the divine origin of the Bible. So, just as in philosophy a clear and distinct perception was needed in order to accept anything as true, so in theology we should not accept anything as true if we could not see clearly and distinctly that it was a divine revelation. In other words, Revelation was to be measured by a
philosophical criterion. Allinga quotes Wittichius’s remark that God is the author of the Cartesian criterion and that therefore this criterion must be true. Apparently the boundaries between theology and philosophy were not as clear and distinct as the Cocceians wished them to be.^[11]

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