Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

(Written Christmas Eve, 2017)

Our frenetic and hyperkinetic way of life these days makes it difficult to take seriously religion and what is essential to it, namely, the belief in what William James calls an Unseen Order. Our communications technology in particular is binding us ever tighter within the human horizon so that the sense of Transcendence is becoming weaker and weaker. So it comes as no surprise that someone would point to 'burnout' as the explanation of Aquinas' failure to finish his sum of theology when the traditional explanation was that he was vouchsafed mystical insight into the Unseen Order:

Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

Jonathan Malesic, from whose Commonweal article the above quotation is taken, finds the traditional explanation "suspiciously pious." (My inclination is to say that his rejection of the traditional explanation is suspiciously post-modern.) What Malesic sees in the final days of the doctor angelicus is "burnout." Malesic builds on a suggestion of Joseph Weishepl:

The most down-to-earth account of Aquinas’s final winter that I have come across is by someone you might expect to play up Aquinas’s sanctity: Joseph Weisheipl, a Dominican writing to commemorate the seven-hundredth anniversary of his confrere’s death. But Weisheipl is interested less in hagiography than in empathy. Sensitive to the rigors of Aquinas’s schedule as a professor and member of a religious order, he argues not for a theological or mystical explanation for Aquinas’s silence, but a physiological one. In his view, “the physical basis for the experience of December 6 was a breakdown of his constitution after so many years of driving himself ceaselessly in the work he loved.” 

Burnout or visio mystica? An 'immanent' explanation in terms of physiology, or a 'transcendent' explanation in terms of supernatural insight?

Or is this a false alternative? It could be that the physiological breakdown triggered the noetic event. It could be that  the breakdown, while disabling Thomas from such exertions as writing, also occasioned an insight into the inadequacy of the discursive intellect for the knowledge of such a lofty Object as was his ultimate concern. 

Of course Aquinas knew all along about the inadequacy of the discursive intellect in respect of God, but I conjecture that it took a mystical experience for him to appreciate the fact  so fully that he saw no point in grinding out more sentences. When the meal is served, the menu is set aside.  

It seems to me that Malesic is opting for the 'burnout' explanation as opposed to the mystical one. If so, then I disagree, and I suggest that he is right in step with the post-modern enclosure with the human horizon mentioned at the outset.  Caught as far too many are these days in a web of 24-7 connectivity, it is hard for them to credit the possibility of any realm of the real beyond the human horizon.  So any explanation of religious phenomena just has to be an 'immanent' one.

So while Malesic finds that traditional explanation "suspiciously pious," I am inclined to suggest that he may be too much a product of his age and that we ought to be suspicious of his suspicion.  As I quipped above, his approach seems suspiciously post-modern.

Our age, influenced by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to name the Big Three among the hermeneuticians of suspicion, is indeed one of deep suspicion, indications of which are the currently pejorative connotations of such words as 'pious,' 'reverence,' and 'hagiography.'  

Religion too is under suspicion along with its supposed saints and prophets and mystics. Some of this suspicion is good: it is just Athens keeping Jerusalem in line and chastening her excesses.  But it goes too far when religion's essence is denied. And what might that be? Here is my answer in seven theses. I think Aquinas would agree with all seven. I am negotiable on (4) and (6) if one cares to insist that Buddhism is a religion as opposed to a sort of philosophical therapeutics.

The Essence of Religion

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So in its full reality it lies beyond the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out.  Should that occur it is called revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. 

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order. 

(Written Christmas Eve, 2017)

Our frenetic and hyperkinetic way of life these days makes it difficult to take seriously religion and what is essential to it, namely, the belief in what William James calls an Unseen Order. Our communications technology in particular is binding us ever tighter within the human horizon so that the sense of Transcendence is becoming weaker and weaker. So it comes as no surprise that someone would point to 'burnout' as the explanation of Aquinas' failure to finish his sum of theology when the traditional explanation was that he was vouchsafed mystical insight into the Unseen Order:

Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

Jonathan Malesic, from whose Commonweal article the above quotation is taken, finds the traditional explanation "suspiciously pious." (My inclination is to say that his rejection of the traditional explanation is suspiciously post-modern.) What Malesic sees in the final days of the doctor angelicus is "burnout." Malesic builds on a suggestion of Joseph Weishepl:

The most down-to-earth account of Aquinas’s final winter that I have come across is by someone you might expect to play up Aquinas’s sanctity: Joseph Weisheipl, a Dominican writing to commemorate the seven-hundredth anniversary of his confrere’s death. But Weisheipl is interested less in hagiography than in empathy. Sensitive to the rigors of Aquinas’s schedule as a professor and member of a religious order, he argues not for a theological or mystical explanation for Aquinas’s silence, but a physiological one. In his view, “the physical basis for the experience of December 6 was a breakdown of his constitution after so many years of driving himself ceaselessly in the work he loved.” 

Burnout or visio mystica? An 'immanent' explanation in terms of physiology, or a 'transcendent' explanation in terms of supernatural insight?

Or is this a false alternative? It could be that the physiological breakdown triggered the noetic event. It could be that  the breakdown, while disabling Thomas from such exertions as writing, also occasioned an insight into the inadequacy of the discursive intellect for the knowledge of such a lofty Object as was his ultimate concern. 

Of course Aquinas knew all along about the inadequacy of the discursive intellect in respect of God, but I conjecture that it took a mystical experience for him to appreciate the fact  so fully that he saw no point in grinding out more sentences. When the meal is served, the menu is set aside.  

It seems to me that Malesic is opting for the 'burnout' explanation as opposed to the mystical one. If so, then I disagree, and I suggest that he is right in step with the post-modern enclosure with the human horizon mentioned at the outset.  Caught as far too many are these days in a web of 24-7 connectivity, it is hard for them to credit the possibility of any realm of the real beyond the human horizon.  So any explanation of religious phenomena just has to be an 'immanent' one.

So while Malesic finds that traditional explanation "suspiciously pious," I am inclined to suggest that he may be too much a product of his age and that we ought to be suspicious of his suspicion.  As I quipped above, his approach seems suspiciously post-modern.

Our age, influenced by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to name the Big Three among the hermeneuticians of suspicion, is indeed one of deep suspicion, indications of which are the currently pejorative connotations of such words as 'pious,' 'reverence,' and 'hagiography.'  

Religion too is under suspicion along with its supposed saints and prophets and mystics. Some of this suspicion is good: it is just Athens keeping Jerusalem in line and chastening her excesses.  But it goes too far when religion's essence is denied. And what might that be? Here is my answer in seven theses. I think Aquinas would agree with all seven. I am negotiable on (4) and (6) if one cares to insist that Buddhism is a religion as opposed to a sort of philosophical therapeutics.

The Essence of Religion

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So in its full reality it lies beyond the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out.  Should that occur it is called revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. 

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order. 

A. E. Taylor on F. H. Bradley on Religion

The following quotations are from A. E. Taylor's "F. H. Bradley" which is an account of his relation with the great philosopher, an account published in Mind, vol. XXXIV, no. 133 (January 1925), pp. 1-12. A. E. Taylor is an important philosopher in his own right whose works, unfortunately, are little read nowadays.

Bradley as a Religious Man

I am confident that no one who knew Bradley personally at any time would have supposed him to be anything but what he actually was, an intensely religious man, in the sense of a man whose whole life and thought was permeated by a conviction of the reality of unseen things and a supreme devotion to them.

Bradley on Bibliolatry

In the last conversation I had with him . . . He spoke bitterly of the Christian Church in our country, chiefly on the charge of an alleged 'idolatry' of the text of the Bible, a fault not, I think, really common among Anglicans at the present. He commended the Roman Church for its discouragement of promiscuous Bible-reading, but held that it did not go far enough. He would have the Church, he said, cease to appeal to any literature from the past and insist directly upon its own inherent authority as the living voice of the divine Spirit.

Bradley on Purgatory

Possibly some of my readers who know Bradley only from his books may be surprised at a remark called from him by a passing reference in the same conversation to Purgatory. "But what do you mean by Purgatory? Does it mean that when I die I shall go somewhere where I shall be made better by discipline? If so, that is what I very much hope." In another mood, no doubt, he might have dwelt on the intellectual difficulties in the way of such a hope, but it was characteristic, or at least I thought so, that he evidently clung to it.

Bradley a Mystic

Bradley's own personal religion was of a strongly marked mystical type, in fact of the specific type common to the Christian mystics. Religion meant to him, as to Plotinus or to Newman, direct personal contact with the Supreme and Ineffable, unmediated through any forms of ceremonial prayer, or ritual, and like all mystics in whom this passion for direct access to God is not moderated by the the habit of organised communal worship, he was inclined to set little store on the historical and institutional element in the great religions.

Bradley on the Incarnation

Thus while the conception of the meeting of the divine and the human in one 'by unity of person' lay at the very heart of his philosophy, he was wholly indifferent to the question whether the ideal of the God-Man has or has not been actually realised in flesh and blood in a definite historical person. Like Hegel, he thought it the significant thing about Christianity that it had believed in the incarnation of God in a definite person, but also, like Hegel, he seemed to think it a matter of small importance that the person in which the 'hypostatic union' was believed to have been accomplished should be Jesus the Nazarene rather than any other, and again whether or not the belief was strictly true to fact. The important thing, to his mind, was that the belief stimulates to the attempt to the achievement of 'deiformity' in our own personality.

John Hick's Religious Ambiguity Thesis

John Hick maintains that

     . . . in this post-Enlightenment age of doubt we have realised that
     the universe is religiously ambiguous. It evokes and sustains
     non-religious as well as religious responses. (An Interpretation of
     Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Yale University
     Press, 1989, p. 74)

Hick identifies non-religious with naturalistic and religious with theistic responses. I would argue that this identification is mistaken since a religious response to the universe need not be theistic (as   witness Buddhism), and a naturalistic response to the universe can be religious (as witness Spinozism). This quibble aside, it is true that theism is a religious response to the universe, and that most   contemporary naturalisms are non-religious responses to it. To simplify the discussion, then, we may identify a religious response with a theistic response and a non-religious response with a naturalistic response.

Hick's religious ambiguity thesis thus boils down to the claim that the universe allows, permits, sustains both a theistic interpretation and a naturalistic interpretation. Hick's case for the thesis involves "showing the inconclusiveness of the various philosophical arguments on both sides." (75) Hick tries to do this by surveying a number of theistic and naturalistic arguments.

But this suggests a question. Is the universe intrinsically such as to permit both theistic and naturalistic responses? Is religious ambiguity an intrinsic property of the universe? Or is it a relational property, a property it has only relative to beings who conceptualize it in different ways?

As the opening quotation suggests, Hick intends his thesis to be an avowal of the intrinsic religious ambiguity of the universe: it is the nature of the universe as it is in itself to allow or permit mutually exclusive interpretations. He says confidently that we have "realised" that the "the universe" is religiously ambiguous. But this thesis of intrinsic religious ambiguity is not supported by his argument. At the most, all his argument shows is that arguments on both sides of the issue are inconclusive, and thus that the universe is religiously  ambiguous for us. It does not show that the universe is religiously ambiguous in itself.

Indeed, it is difficult to understand what the latter could mean. How could the universe in itself be neither such that it was created by God, nor such that it was not created by God? In itself, the universe cannot be religiously or metaphysically ambiguous. The ambiguity is on our side, residing in our incapacity to arrive at a rationally compelling view one way or the other. I chalk it up to the infirmity of our reason.

In this predicament we must decide what we are to believe and how we are to act. A leap of faith is required. But whether one's faith is naturalistic or religious, it affirms something about the universe in itself. As far as I can see, Hick has not made a compelling case for his claim that the universe in itself is religiously ambiguous.

Will Science Put Religion Out of Business? A Preliminary Tilt at Transhumanism

Written 17 October 2011; minor revisions 16 September 2018

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A correspondent writes:

Here's how I think science will eventually put religion out of business. Soon medical science is going to be able to offer serious life extension, not pie-in-the-sky soul survival or re-incarnation, but real life extension with possible rejuvenation. When science can offer and DELIVER what religion can only promise, religion is done.

1)  Religion is in the transcendence business.  The type of transcendence offered depends on the particular religion.  The highly sophisticated form of Christianity expounded by Thomas Aquinas offers the visio beata, the Beatific Vision.  In the BV -- you will forgive the abbreviation -- the soul does not lose its identity.  It maintains its identity, though in a transformed mode, while participating in the divine life.  Hinduism and Buddhism offer even more rarefied forms of transcendence in which the individual self is either absorbed into the eternal Atman/Brahman, thereby losing its individual identity, or extinguished altogether by entry into Nirvana. 

And there are cruder forms of transcendence, in popular forms of Christianity, in Islam, and in other faiths, in which the individual continues to exist after death  but with little or no transformation to enjoy delights that are commensurable with the ones enjoyed here below.  The crudest form, no doubt, is the popular Islamic notion of paradise as an endless sporting with 72 black-eyed virgins.  So on the one end of the spectrum: transcendence as something difficult to distinguish from utter extinction; on the other end, immortality mit Haut und Haar (to borrow a delightful phrase from Schopenhauer), "with skin and hair" in a realm of sensuous delights but without the usual negatives such as heart burn and erectile dysfunction. 

I think we can safely say that a religion that offers no form of transcendence, whether Here or Hereafter, is no religion at all.  Religion, then, is in the business of offering transcendence.

2)  I agree with my correspondent that if science can provide what religion promises, then science will put religion out  of business.  But as my crude little sketch above shows, different religions promise different things.  Now the crudest form of transcendence is physical immortality, immortality "with skin and hair" and with no moral or spiritual transformation.  Is it reasonable to hope that future science will give rise to a technology that will make us, or some of us, physically immortal?  I don't think so.  That would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics according to which the entropy of an irreversible process in an isolated system increases leading in the case of the universe (which is both isolated and irreversible) to the heat death of the universe and the end of all life.  Granted, that is way off in the future.  But that is irrelevant if the claim is that physical immortality is possible by purely physical means.  And if that is not the claim, then the use of the phrase 'physical immortality' is out of place.  In a serious discussion like this word games are strictly verboten.

3) Physical immortality is nomologically impossible, impossible given the laws of nature.  Of course, a certain amount of life extension has been achieved and it is reasonable to expect that more will be achieved. So suppose the average life expectancy of people like us gets cranked up to 130 years.  To underscore the obvious, to live to 130 is not to live forever. Suppose you have made it to 130 and are now on your death bed.  If you have any spiritual depth at all, your lament is likely to be similar to that of Jacob's: "The length of my pilgrimage  has been one hundred and thirty years; short and wretched has been my life, nor does it compare with the years my fathers lived during their pilgrimage." (Genesis 47:9) 

The important point here is that once a period of time is over, it makes no difference how long it has lasted.  It is over and done with and accessible only in the flickering and dim light of intermittent and fallible memory.  The past 'telescopes' and 'scrunches up,' the years melt into one another; the past cannot be relived.  What was distinctly lived is now all a blur.  And now death looms before you.  What does it matter that you lived 130 or 260 years? You are going to die all the same, and be forgotten, and all your works with you. After a while it will be as if you never existed.

The problem is not that our lives are short; the problem is that we are in time at all.  No matter how long a life extends it is still a life in time, a life in which the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present a passing away.  This problem, the problem of the transitoriness of life, cannot be solved by life extension even if, per impossibile, physical immortality were possible.  This problem of the transitoriness and vanity of life is one that religion addresses. It is one that science cannot address, let alone solve. 

So my first conclusion is this.  Even if we take religion in its crudest form, as promising physical immortality, "with skin and hair," science cannot put such a crude religion out of business.  For, first of all, physical immortality is physically impossible, and second, mere life extension, even unto the age of a Methuselah, does not solve the problem of the transitoriness of life.

4) But I have just begun to scratch the surface of the absurdities of transhumanism. No higher religion is about providing natural goodies  by supernatural means, goodies  that cannot be had by natural means.   Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can only think in material terms and only believe in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament we find ourselves in in this life.

What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives.  It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.  We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder.  We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don't have and wouldn't satisfy us even if we had it.  We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived.  It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse.  It is not just that are hearts are cold; our hearts are foul.  You say none of this applies to you?  Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave.  You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.

Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil.  So my correspondent couldn't be more wrong.  No physical technology can do what religion tries to do.  Suppose a technology is developed that actually reverses the processes of aging and keeps us all alive indefinitely.  This is pure fantasy, of course, given the manifold contingencies of the world (nuclear and biological warfare, terrorism, natural disasters, etc.); but just suppose.  Our spiritual and moral predicament would remain as deeply fouled-up as it has always been and religion would remain in business.

5)  If, like my correspondent, you accept naturalism and scientism, then you ought to face what you take to be reality, namely, that we are all just clever animals slated to perish utterly in a few years, and not seek transcendence where it cannot be found.  Accept no substitutes!  Transhumanism is an ersatz religion that cannot deliver.

It could be like this.  All religions are false; none can deliver what they promise.  Naturalism is true: reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  You are not unreasonable if you believe this.  But I say you are unreasonable if you think that technologies derived from the sciences of nature can deliver what religions have promised.

As long as there are human beings there will be religion.  The only way I can imagine religion withering away is if humanity allows itself to be gradually replaced by soulless robots.  But in that case it will not be that the promises of religion are fulfilled by science; it would be that no one would be around having religious needs.

My Relation to Catholicism

Written 8 October 2011; minor revisions 13 September 2018.

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This from a graduate student in philosophy who describes himself as a theologically conservative Protestant who is toying with the idea of 'swimming the Tiber':

In a recent post  you say this: ""Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic  Church is a good recent example.)"

Until I read this comment, I, for some reason, was under the impression that you were a Catholic.  I was wondering if you would be willing to elaborate on this comment, say more about your take on the Catholic Church, direct me to a post in which you say more about these  issues, or direct me to some literature on this topic that you think  would be useful.

This request allows me to clarify my relation to Catholicism.  I am a cradle Catholic brought up by a pious mother and an indifferent father. She made sure that I attended the parochial school from the first grade on.  Those were the pre-Vatican II  days before the rot set in, when being Catholic was something rather more definite than it  is now.  Many with my kind of upbringing were unfazed by their religious training, went along to get along, but then sloughed  off the training and the trappings as soon as they could. 

For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with.  Only some have it, just as only some have a philosophical predisposition. Having the former predisposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a religion's taking firm root.  Another necessary condition is that the person have some religious and/or mystical experiences.  Without the predisposition and the experiences, religion, especially a religion as rich in dogmatic articulation as Roman Catholicism, and as stringent in its moral demands, will be exceedingly hard to credit and take seriously in the face of the countervailing influences from nature (particularly the nature in one's own loins) and society with its worldly values. 

For some Catholics of my Boomer generation, the extreme cognitive dissonance between the teachings of the Church and the 'teachings' and attitudes of the world, in particular the world of the '60s, led to radical questioning.  For example, we were taught that all sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments were mortal and that premarital and extramarital sex  even in those forms that fell shy of intercourse were wrong.  The 'teachings' of the world and the surrounding culture were of course quite the opposite.  For many brought up Catholic, this was not much of a problem: the cognitive dissonance was quickly relieved by simply dropping the religion or else watering it down into some form of namby-pamby humanism.  For others like myself who had the religious predisposition and the somewhat confirmatory religious/mystical experiences, the problem of cognitive dissonance was very painful and not easily solved.

And, having not only a religious, but also a philosophical predisposition, it was natural to turn to philosophy as a means of sorting things out and relieving the tension between the doctrines and practices that had been the center of my life and the source of existential meaning, on the one hand,  and the extramural wide world of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the secular values of 'making it' and getting ahead, on the other.  The sex bit was just one issue.  The fundamental problem I faced was whether any of what I was brought up to believe, of what I internalized and took with utmost seriousness, was true. 

I am blessed or cursed with an analytic mind and a serious disposition. For such a person words mean things and truth matters.  As salutary as belief is, it is only true beliefs that can be credited.  This brings me to a fundamental theme of this weblog, namely, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. I see this as a fruitful tension, and I see the absence of anything like it the Islamic world as part of the explanation of that world's inanition.

It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in those few individuals who are citizens of both 'cities,' those few who harbor within them both the religious and the philosophical predisposition.  It is a tension that cannot be resolved by elimination of one or the other of the 'cities.' But why is it fruitful?

The philosopher and the religionist need each other's virtues. The philosopher needs reverence to temper his analytic probing and humility to mitigate the arrogance of his high-flying inquiry and over-confident reliance on his magnificent yet paltry powers of thought. The religionist needs skepticism to limit his gullibility, logical rigor to discipline his tendency toward blind fideism, and balanced dialectic to chasten his disposition to fanaticism.

So am I a Catholic or not?  Well, I am certainly a Catholic by upbringing, so I am a Catholic in what we could call a cultural or sociological sense.  But it is very difficult for a philosopher to be a naive adherent of any religion, especially a religion as deeply encrusted with dogma as Roman Catholicism.  He will inevitably be led to 'sophisticate' his adherence, and to the extent that he does this he will wander off into what are called 'heresies.'  He will find it impossible not to ask questions.  His craving for clarity and certainty will cause him to ask whether key doctrines are even intelligible, let alone true.  Just what are we believing when we believe that there is one God in three divine persons?  What does it even mean? Just what are we believing when we believe that there once walked on the earth a man who was fully human but also fully divine? How is it possible?

I distance myself both from the anti-Catholic polemicists and the pro-Catholic apologists.  Polemics and apologetics are two sides of the same coin, the coin of  ideology.  'Ideology' is not a pejorative term in my mouth.  An ideology is a set of beliefs oriented toward action, and act we must.  So believe we must, in something or other.  Human action is not a mechanical response to stimuli but free action guided by beliefs. Religions are ideologies in this sense: action-guiding systems of belief.  But philosophy-as-inquiry is not ideological, although a particular product of such inquiry, a philosophy, might well be.  For more on this, see Philosophy, Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion: Four Theses.

I am skeptical of organizations and institutions despite the fact that we cannot do without them.  The truth is something too large and magnificent to be 'institutionalized.'  The notion that it is the sole possession of one church, the 'true' church, is a  claim hard to credit especially in light of the fact that different churches claim to be the true one.  Also dubious is the notion that extra ecclesiam salus non est, that outside the church there is no salvation.  And note that different churches will claim to be the one outside of which there is no salvation.  That should give one pause.  If it doesn't, then I suggest that one is  insufficiently critical, insufficiently concerned with truth, and too much concerned with one's own doxastic security.  Why does one need a church at all?  And why this one?  Why not Eastern Orthodoxy or some denomination of  Protestantism? These are questions whose formulation and answering must needs be 'extra-ecclesial.' 

Now if you are a philosopher this is all just more grist for the mill, along with all the things that Catholic apologists will say in defense of their faith.  They will say that their church is the true church because it was founded by Jesus Christ (who is God) and has existed continuously from its founding under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit whose inspiration guarantees the correctness of its teachings on faith and morals. 

They will tell me that a church is necessary to correct the errors of private opinions.  Now it must be frankly admitted that thinking for oneself, treading the independent path, and playing the maverick can just as easily lead one into error as into truth.  If thinking for oneself were the royal road to truth, then all who think for themselves would agree on what the truth is.   They don't.  But let us not forget that that church dogmas often reflect the private opinions of the dominant characters at the councils.  The common opinion is just the private opinion that won the day.  You say Augustine was   inspired by the Holy Spirit?  That is a claim you are making.  How validate it?  Why don't the Protestants agree with you?  Why don't the Eastern Orthodox agree with you?

This only scratches the surface, but one cannot spend the whole day blogging.  

Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

Written 7 May 2014

R. C.  writes,

There is much depth in your short post on religion and reason from 6 May. Here are two points I often ponder about this topic:

First, I appreciate the difficulty of solving philosophical problems, but I wonder about the claim that they are insoluble (I suppose “insoluble” means “insoluble by humans alone”). If the problems are beyond mere human knowledge, how could we know this? One may inductively suspect insolubility by reflecting upon his experience of practicing philosophy, but how could he know the unknowable? If we can’t solve philosophical problems by philosophizing, then it seems we can’t conclude insolubility by philosophizing because this very conclusion would be a philosophical conclusion.

BV:  I hold that the central problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble.  And you are right, by 'insoluble' I mean insoluble by us or by beings of a similar cognitive architecture, ectypal intellects in Kant's jargon. Furthermore, pace Nicholas Rescher, I don't count a 'solution' that is relative to some set of background assumptions and cognitive values as a solution.  Of course there are solutions in this sense.  Nominalists solve the problem of univerals in one way, realists in another, conceptualists in a third, etc. But those are merely intramural solutions.  What is wanted are solutions acceptable to all, solutions that hold outside the walls of self-reinforcing enclaves of the like-minded.

You ask a very important question:  How could one know that the central philosophical problems are insoluble?  You yourself supplied the clue:  by induction from philosophical experience.  The best and the brightest have been at this game for thousands of years but not one single problem has been solved during this period, solved to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. Everything is up for grabs, even the most elementary and picayune topics.  Take a look at what is going one as we speak in the thread on logical form.  Philosophers can't even agree on the most basic concepts of deductive logic.  There is controversy everywhere.  This is a plain fact.

The strife of systems and the ubiquity and longevity of controversy need explaining and I offer the insolubility thesis as the best explanation.  Why haven't the problems been solved?  Because they are insoluble.  I agree with Benson Mates on this point.  Of course, the following is an invalid argument form:  Such-and-such has hitherto not been accomplished; ergo, such-and-such will never be accomplished.  But then every inductive argument is invalid.  Some inductive arguments, however, do quite reasonably support their conclusions.  

But you can and should press your objection.  If I maintain that the problems of philosophy are insoluble, then, given that the metaphilosophical problem of whether or not philosophical problems are soluble is itself a philosophical problem,  it follows that the metaphilosophical problem is insoluble.  Is this a difficult for my position?  Not obviously.  I simply 'bite the bullet' as they say.  I accept that the meta problem is also insoluble.

In fact, the insolubility of the meta problem is further evidence of my thesis.

In other words, I am not dogmatizing.  I am not claiming to know with certainty that the problems of philosophy are insoluble.  I am not claiming to have solved the meta problem.  I am merely claiming that the insolubility thesis is very reasonably maintained.  Not every truth is such that we can know it to be true.  With some truths the most we can expect here below is reasonable belief.

Compare God and the soul.  I do not claim to know with certainty whether either exists.  I claim merely that it it is reasonable to affirm both.  

Second, I agree that it’s wise to intelligently practice religion and mysticism -- which, by the way, rules out superstition and group-think! Take religion: religious practice does not exclude reason, as Mates’ quote implies. It is a false dilemma to say “One can seek truth either by reason or religion, but not both.” Why not both? If I try to lift a stone and realize I can’t manage alone, this would not entail that I can or should stop lifting. If a stronger person assists me, and I trust his assistance, I can still lift. He may request my help. He may even require that I give it my all, and I may grow from the effort. Likewise, intelligent religion requires reason.

Consider Christianity: The biblical conception of faith is “trust based on good reasons”. This point is clear in passages such as Hebrews 11:1 and 1 Peter 3:15. In the Gospels, Jesus himself reasons and encourages others to do the same. Christian faith calls for the whole self: heart, mind, soul, and strength.  

I’d be interested in your thoughts on reason and intelligent religion.

BV: I basically agree with you.  Reason in the end must confess its own infirmity.  It cannot deliver on its promises. The truth-seeker must explore other avenues.  Religion is one, mysticism is another. 

Christopher Hitchens, Religion, and Cognitive Dissonance

Christopher Hitchens says somewhere that he didn't suffer from cognitive dissonance of the sort that arises when a deeply internalized religious upbringing collides with the contrary values of the world, since he never took religion or theism seriously in the first place.  But then I say religion was never a Jamesian live option for him.  If not a live existential option, however, one that engages the whole man and not just his intellect, then not an option explored with the openness and sympathy and humility requisite for understanding. 

So why should we take seriously what Hitchens says about religion?  He hasn't sympathetically entered into the subject.  He hasn't fulfilled the prerequisites for understanding.  One such prerequisite is openness to the pain of cognitive dissonance as suffered when the doctrines, precepts and practices of a religion taken seriously come into conflict with a world that mocks them when not ignoring them.  But in Hitchens by his own account there was not even the possibility of cognitive dissonance.

Consider two working class individuals.  The first is a sensitive poet with real poetic ability.  His family, however, considers poetry effete and epicene and nothing that a real man could or should take seriously.  The second is a lout with no appreciation of poetry whatsoever.  The first suffers cognitive dissonance as his ideal world of poetic imagination collides with the grubby work-a-day-world of his unlettered parents and relatives.  The second fellow obviously suffers from no comparable cognitive dissonance: he never took poetry seriously in the first place.

The  second fellow, however, is full of himself and his opinions and does not hesitate to hold forth in the manner of the bar room bullshitter on any and all topics, including poetry.  Should we credit his opinions about poetry?  Of course not: he has never engaged with it by practice or careful reading or the consultation of works of literary criticism.  He knows not whereof he speaks.  His nescience reflects his lack of the poetic 'organ.' 

Similarly,  a fellow like Hitchens, as clever as he is, lacks the religious 'organ.'  So religion is closed off from him and what he says about it , though interesting, need not be taken all that seriously, or is to be taken seriously only in a negative way in the manner of the pathologist in his study of pathogens.

Companion post:  David Lewis on Religion

Books or Eternal Life?

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 94:

A priest who regrets having to leave his books when dying? Which proves that the intense pleasure of eternal life does not infinitely exceed the gentle company of books.

Come on, Al, be serious. Eternal life is an object of faith and hope, not of knowledge or sure expectation. The good padre regrets leaving the familiar and reliable pleasures that he knows and loves and is practically certain of, pleasures he need not have faith in or hope for, and is anxious over the wrenching transition that will pitch him headlong into Kingdom Come.

There are confirmed worldlings who simply do not understand religion. Camus is one of them.

Nagel on Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion

I have in my hand a copy of Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford University Press, 1997). The last essay in The Last Word is entitled, "Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion." One hopes that Nagel does not consider it the last word on the topic given its fragmentary nature and occasional perversity. But it's a good essay nonetheless. Everything by Thomas Nagel is worth reading.  Herewith, a bit of interpretive summary with quotations and comments.

Nagel's essay begins by pointing out a certain Platonism in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, a Platonism that is foreign to pragmatism as usually understood. Nagel quotes Peirce as saying that the aim of science is "eternal verities," a notion at odds with the Jamesian view that the true is that which it is good for us to believe. What science is after is not a set of beliefs conducive to our flourishing but a set of beliefs that correspond to the world as it is independently of us. The researcher aims to "learn the lesson that nature has to teach. . . ." But to do this, the inquiring mind must "call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale [the natural light]. . . ."

Nagel finds these "radically antireductionist" and "realist" thoughts "entirely congenial" but "quite out of keeping with present fashion." (129) And talk of an "inward sympathy" of the inquiring mind with nature he finds "alarmingly Platonist."

But why should Nagel be alarmed at the Platonist view that reason operating properly mirrors the antecedent structure of reality? His alarm is rooted in the suspicion that the Platonist view is "religious, or quasi-religious." (130) A rationalism such as the Platonic "makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable." (130, emphasis in original.) That there should be a fundamental harmony between mind and world makes people "nervous" nowadays. This uncomfortableness and nervousness is one manifestation of the fear of religion in intellectual life.

Nagel makes it clear that he is talking about the fear of religion as such, and not merely fear of certain of its excesses and aberrations, and confesses that he himself is subject to this fear:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. (130, emphasis added)

Nagel admits that he may just have a "cosmic authority problem." But then he says something very perceptive in a passage that may be directed against Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett:

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. (131)

Let me give an example of my own of the overuse of evolutionary biology. After Dawkins introduced the term 'meme' along about 1976, Dennett ran with it like a crazed footballer. Roughly, a meme is a self-replicating entity that plays on the cultural level the role that the gene plays on the biological level. They are like ideas, except that they are thought of -- literally, Dennett assures us -- as brain parasites. (Consciousness Explained, p. 220) A brain infested with these self-replicating parasites is really all that a mind is: "a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes." (CE, p. 207)

Now this is not the place to begin a critique of the meme meme; my only point for the nonce is that Nagel is on to something. Fear of religion with its attendant cosmic authority problem may well be a good part of what is driving this 'philosophy fiction' of Dennett and other fanciful ideas that stem from the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology.