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| René Descartes |
I was raised in a very Catholic environment and before the
Second Vatican Council. I lived in a
strong Catholic Ghetto in which public school education was anathema and you
didn’t go to the YMCA even though they had an indoor swimming pool. The Sisters of Mercy taught me in primary
school—from which I graduated in 1962, the year Vatican II opened. I had the Jesuits in High School and Vatican
II held its final session in December of my Senior Year. These were formative years for me and there
was great harmony between the faith that I was being taught in school and the
faith my parents, both devout Catholics, were conveying to me and my siblings
at home. My Mom was a member of the
Parish Altar and Rosary Society; my Dad a member of the Holy Name Society. Together they were members of the Christian
Family Movement and hosted in our home bi-weekly meetings of other couples who,
with one of the parish priests, studied the faith together. My Dad was a daily communicant and devoted to
the rosary. Our home was consecrated to
the Sacred Heart. We regularly—often two
or three nights a week—had various priest friends at our home for supper. All this is to establish my credentials as
having been raised an authentic dyed-in-the-wool Roman Catholic in the best of
pre-Vatican II faith.
That being said, we believed that somewhere just slightly
after the Blessed Mother and somewhere up the ranks from the seraphim and
cherubim stood robed in the glory of God, Franklin D. Roosevelt. We believed that, while we each have a
personal responsibility for charity, through the collective agency of society
represented by government, we have an joint obligation to assist those less
fortunate members of society and to level—to some authentic degree—the playing
field so that all had a relatively equal access to building a future for
themselves. We were taught to believe
that workers had a God-given right to organize and had as much right to the
profits of their work as did the owners of capital. This was before Mater et Magistra or Laborem
Exercens, or Popolorum Progressio,
but we were schooled in reverence for Rerum
Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. While it was in the day before LGBT issues
emerged from the social closet, we were taught to believe that discrimination
against individuals for any reason—racial, ethnic, religious—was inherently
unjust and that while we might disagree with a person whose opinions were
different than ours, there were rules of civility to be followed. And we were taught that while the Middle Ages
represented a flourishing of our Christian Faith, and the Protestant
Reformation represented a breakdown of the social order, that the Enlightenment
was the foundation of all that is good in our modern world and especially in
these United States.
I still agree with most of what I learned in those years of
my Catholic youth but I am seriously questioning the Enlightenment. In fact, the more I look at it, the more
insidious I see its effects.
The name attempts to sell the basic goodness of the
period. Enlightenment. Don’t we all want to be enlightened? First of all, the name, Lumières, was coined by one of its leading proponents, the
Abbé
Jean Baptiste Dubos. Always be aware of self-advertising.
Dubos, though a priest, did not practice his ministry but was noted for his
work as a historian and litterateur. He was a member of the Académie
française
and elected perpetual secretary of the same in 1723. Kant introduced the term into German as Aufklärung
(from aufklären—to make clear, to enlighten) in 1784. The term Enlightenment only came into English
in the second half of the 19th century, long after its havoc had been
wreaked on the western—and in particular, the American, mind.
In many ways the intellectual revolution of the 17th
and 18th centuries that we sanctify with the title “the
Enlightenment” was a consequence of the Protestant Reformations and the
breakdown of Traditional authority structures that the Reformations both
represented and caused. This breakdown
of Traditional authority structures, structures that were petrifying into
absolutism both in Church and State, was far from all bad. Monolithic power—whether represented by Royal
Absolutism in Tudor-Stuart England, Bourbon France, Hapsburg/Bourbon Spain, or
by the growing power of the papacy in post-Trent Catholicism was putting
western society on an intellectually and politically suicidal trajectory that
the intellectual challenges raised by Enlightenment scientific and
philosophical figures were able to thwart before we sank back into a new Dark Ages. Protestantism, from the mild variety of
Luther to the radical strains of the Anabaptists and Unitarians, made sure that
the western mind knew that there must be nothing beyond questioning yet
Protestantism itself, when once established by the State in Anglican England,
Lutheran Denmark, Calvinist Geneva, took itself as seriously as the
Inquisitorial Catholicism of Spain. It
took the post-Christians philosophes
to continue to insist on the freedom of the intellect to inquire and
challenge.
In many ways the Church’s lock hold on intellectual life
began to crack not only before the philosophes
of the Enlightenment but even before the Reformers posed their theological
challenges. William of Ockham
(1287-1347), an English Franciscan Friar who taught Philosophy at Oxford
challenged the established thought of his time by pioneering Nominalism—a
philosophy that denies the existence of universals or abstractions and posits
that things exist only in their individual realities. Ockham also posited, in distinction to
Aquinas, that theological truths could only be apprehended by faith and that
reason plays no part in theology. This
opened a philosophical chasm by which theology—or even faith in God—could be
separated from science and scientific reasoning.
That separation would be put to the test in the work of
Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish/Prussian astronomer. Copernicus was a true polymath and was
educated in Poland and in Italy with backgrounds in mathematics, geometry,
philosophy, classical languages, medicine, Canon Law, and astronomy. Although he was never ordained a priest, his
maternal uncle Lucas Watzenrode, Prince-Bishop of Warmia, arranged for him to
be a canon in his cathedral. His duties
as a canon, since he was not a priest, were mostly administrative but also
included the practice of medicine.
Through his entire life he was fascinated with astronomy and during his
studies in Italy he shared a residence with Dominico Maria Novara de Ferrara
whose chief assistant he became for the years he studied in Bologna. His interest in astronomy continued and he
began to acquire the writings of ancient astronomers such as Aristarchus of
Samos, Cleomedes, Heraclides Ponticus, and Ecphantus the Pythagorean. His studies led him to return to the ancient
Greek theory that the earth revolved around the sun rather than that the sun
and planets revolved around the earth.
This idea that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the
solar system was perceived to be a direct threat to Christian faith by Church
authorities for whom the Bible clearly taught that the earth and its
inhabitants are the very reason for the existence of creation and therefore
must be its center. In fact, several of
the ancient astronomers had long posited that the earth revolved around the
sun, but the triumph of Christianity in Western Europe and Islam in the Near
East, North Africa, and Spain both theologically demanded a geocentric
universe. (To be fair, Aristotle and
Ptolemy both held to a geocentric model so it was not without its advocates
outside Judaic/Christian/Islamic sphere.)
Copernicus’ theories did not raise a lot of theological dust
within his lifetime, but it sure got Galileo in a boatload of manure despite
his friendship with Pope Urban VIII who was a strong admirer of Galileo and who
often spoke with him about heliocentrism.
Unfortunately in one of his books defending a heliocentric universe
Galileo used the Pope’s conversations in a way that made Urban look foolish and
that brought down the theological establishment both on the astronomer and his
theories. Of course, while in the short
run Galileo paid for his intellectual adventurism, in the long run the Church
came out looking absolutely stupid for its opposition to contemporary
science. (Hmmm, is there a lesson to be
learned here.)
In many ways the Enlightenment is rooted in the scientific
discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries, which not
only challenged but overturned the received wisdom of earlier ages. The Englishman, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), is
considered to be one of the founders of modern science. Bacon was both a philosopher and a
scientist—and, for that matter, a man of religious faith. (He was Church of
England.) Bacon advocated the use of experiments and observation to advance
scientific knowledge rather than abstract philosophical argument. It seems elementary to us today that one
advances knowledge by observation of the facts but in the theologically
dominated world of the time all truth was seen as needing to be conformed to
theological and philosophical principles rather than having an integrity of its
own. This was basically the same problem
faced by Galileo: when our observation of physical realities conflicts with
biblical texts or theological principles, which “truth” is to be accepted? And so we have this famous quote
God made dinosaurs
4,000 years ago as ultimately flawed creatures, lizards of Satan really, so
when they died and became petroleum products we, made in his perfect image,
could use them in our pickup trucks, snow machines and fishing boats.
Well, maybe she didn’t really say that, but there are people
who believe something mighty close to this freakish idea because for them
religion still trumps science.
Another figure on whom the Enlightenment is founded is René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes was a mathematician, the founder of
analytic geometry. But he is remembered
precisely for his philosophical role.
Descartes considered himself to be a devout Catholic and indeed, though
he lived much of his life in the Calvinist Netherlands and Lutheran Sweden, he
remained constant in the practice of his faith and was ultimately buried in one
of my favorite Parisian churches, Saint Germain de Prés. Descartes is famous for his Cogito ergo sum: I know, therefore I
am. This is theologically
revolutionary. No longer is it that the
certainty of my existence is contingent on God’s being, but rather I can be
certain of my existence because I am self-aware. The philosophical center has shifted from God
who has created to the human person who is aware of his own being. Note, this self-awareness does not deny the
existence of God, nor does it deny that God is creator, but it does rob God of
some of his thunder because it permits me my own existence on my own
terms. I no longer need God—or the
Church—as an authority because I can rely on my own knowledge that comes not
from outside “givens” but from my own observation and reflection. The human intellect, not the Bible, not the
Church, now is the arbiter of truth.Descartes sent the pious Pascal into
paroxysms of religious fury and ended up after his death with his works on the
Index of Forbidden Books.
When it comes to Copernicus or Galileo or Descartes and the
interplay between religious faith and scientific knowledge, I don’t have a
problem and indeed I would argue that science, even the broader sense of all
human knowledge, has to be able to
pursue its exploration without having its conclusions short-circuited by
religious doctrines. But we have only
scratched the surface of the Enlightenment.
In future postings I think we can see some of the serious problems the
rationalism of the Enlightenment will spawn.
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