CHAPTER FOUR: CHRISTIANITY
FAITH AND REASON
4.1 Scripture and the early Fathers
In the Old Testament the Wisdom literature, particularly the Deutercanonical books, show considerable influence of philosophy from both the Greek and the Semitic worlds. Some of this is reflected in the New Testament, although much of what once was considered Greek has been found to have Jewish roots. In 1 Corinthians Paul set the tone by arguing that Jesus is the fullness of wisdom which we seek. He contrasts this with the wisdom of the world which does not know the most important truths.
Following St. Paul, some early Christian apologetes saw philosophy as an aid leading to the truth of the Gospel, while others saw it as an alien competitor to Christian revelation.
Justin Martyr (c. 130) took a positive approach to human sciences or philosophy, accepting all that is true and correcting what is false. He propounded the theory of “logia spermatika”, meaning that the eternal Logos (Jesus) spread the seeds of truth in the intelligences of all men; so they all have a partial grasp of truth. At the same time he argued that the Christian faith had the answer to the perplexities of the philosophers about God, the soul and the world.
Tatian, another apologete, took a negative approach to philosophy, contrasting it with Christianity. Whereas Justin, who had claimed for Christianity the benefit of all that was good and true in Greek culture, died a martyr, this arch-enemy of Greek philosophy died out of communion with the Church.
Athanagoras (c. 177) used philosophy to defend the liberty of Christianity, arguing, for example, that if Plato, Aristole and the Stoics were monotheists and were considered harmless, why should Christians be persecuted for their monotheism. The most interesting innovation of Athanagoras was to distinguish philosophical arguments which attempt to prove the rational possibility of doctrines of faith, and those which attempt to confirm these same doctrines.
Irenaeus (c. 190) is famous for his writings against the Gnostic heresy. He insisted that the true gnosis (knowledge) is the teaching of the twelve Apostles. But is is permissible and praiseworthy to speculate on this teaching, since speculation about mysteries is not to substitute speculation for mysteries.
Hippolytus was a severe critic of philosophy, but his method is noteworthy in that he always summarizes the teachings of the philosophers before attempting to refute them.
After the apologetes, Clement of Alexandria (c. 200) is remarkable for the extensive, though eclectic, use he makes of Greek philosophy. He justifies this by maintaining that the Greeks borrowed it from the Old Testament; so Christians who study it are only appropriating what is their own.
The other major teacher of Alexandria, Origen (d.c. 254), taught that Greek philosophy is neither good nor bad in itself, but can become one or the other according to the way we use it. Origen was a proponent of interpretations of Scripture, and used philosophical presuppositions while doing so.
Among the Latins, Tertullian (d.c. 220) was utterly opposed to philosophy. “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” His negative approach to most other things in life and his imbalanced personality led him eventually to quit the Church and become a Montanist, ultimately forming his own sect of it.
Lactantius, in dabbling in philosophy, sometimes argued foolishly, such as trying to disprove the common notion that the world is round. But he taught the complementarity of wisdom and religion, seeing that pagan worship lacked philosophy and the philosophers lacked true religion. He said, “Religion is contained in wisdom, and wisdom in religion”, setting the tone for the whole Middle Ages.
4.2 After Constantine
The peace enjoyed by the Church from the time of Constantine (313) enabled it to face squarely some theological problems. The first of these was Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ. A speculative theology using philosophy had to be developed to define the question. After the Council of Nicaea the terms “substance”, “person” and “nature” became terms of the Christian creeds. In facing Arianism, Gregory Nazianzen (d. 389) simply refused to allow the Christian faith to be subjected to Arius’ dialectical reasoning - which reduced the Father to the Platonic “One”, and the Son to the Nous which was subordinate to the “One”.
Basil the Great (d. 379), on the other hand, wanted to use dialectics to define with precision the object of Christian faith.
The great St. Augustine was preceded by Marius Victorinus, an avid Platonist who tried to express his Christian faith in Platonic terms, but with great confusion. St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, at the same time avoided philosophical speculation. It remained for Augustine, armed with Victorinus’ translation of Plotinus, to carry philosophical speculation to new heights in his reflections on religion. We can sum up his attitude in the words of Thomas Aquinas: “Whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their teaching anything consistent with faith, he adopted it; and those things which he found contrary to the faith he amended” (Summa theologiae, I, q.84, a.5).
Following Augustine, Boethius (d. 524) translated into Latin the logical works of Aristotle with the view “Conjoin faith and reason, if you can”. His works influenced the whole of medieval theology.
For Augustine, as well as for Pseudo-Dionysius (Denis the Areopagite), John of Damascus, and the other Greek Fathers, Platonism was very much in evidence. These men were first of all Christians to whom the truth of faith and its dogmas depended in no way on philosophy, but only used philosophy to help express it. Why were the Fathers attracted to Platonism? We can answer in the words of Etienne Gilson:[1]
It seems difficult to deny that Plato offered himself as an ally of Christianity on several important points: the doctrine of a maker of the universe; of a provident God; of the existence of an intelligible and divine world of which the sensible world is only an image; of the spirituality of the soul and its superiority over the body; of the illumination of the soul by God; of its enslavement to the body and of the necessity for it to liberate itself; last, not the least, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and of a life beyond the grave where it will receive the reward or punishment for its acts.. The Fathers discovered in Plato and in some neo-platonists a more or less vague presentiment of the Christian Trinity, the Demiurge announcing the Father, the Nous corresponding to the Word, and the World Soul to the Holy Spirit. Besides, the whole doctrine of Plato was animated with such a love of truth and of those divine realities which every true philosopher strives to attain that one could hardly imagine a philosophy that would come nearer being a religion without actually being one.. In the course of this task of assimilation errors were the more to be expected as Christian dogma itself was then in the process of being formulated.
4.3 The early Middle Ages
From the 6th century Europe entered a period of anarchy called the Dark Ages. Charlemagne instigated a revival of intellectual life in the 9th century which culminated in the person of John Scotus Erigena (d.c. 877). Deriving inspiration from a translation of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, he wrote about many questions of theology. For him, “true religion is true philosophy, and true philosophy is true religion.” Faith is necessary for true understanding, and the object of true understanding is the very contents of faith.
Europe relapsed into the dark ages after Charlemagne, and culture was not generally revived until the 11th century. St. Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) held Augustine’s principle: “I believe in order that I may understand”. Not to put faith first is presumption; not to appeal to reason next is negligence. St. Anselm’s confidence in reason’s power of interpretation was unlimited. He does not confuse faith and reason, but everything happens as though one could always manage to understand, if not what one believes, at least the necessity of believing it. Anselm did not shrink from the task of proving the necessity of the Trinity and the Incarnation.[2] Anselm had at his disposal only the tool of Aristotle’s dialectics, which he used to show that rational inquiry necessarily supports the mysteries of faith. He did not have the metaphysics and other works of Aristotle to develop his thought with proper analysis to realize both what could and could not be proven or explained regarding the mysteries of faith.
Peter Abelard (d. 1142) was one of the most brilliant minds of the early Middle Ages. He tended to view grace as a blossoming of nature, or inversely, to conceive Christianity as the total truth which includes all others within it. He boldly called the Greek philosophers Christians who followed the natural law. All that remained for them, as for the Jews and pagans, was to acknowledge the richer and more comprehensive truth of Christian faith.
With St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) and William of Saint Thierry (d. 1148) mysticism became another avenue to the truth, in fact the paramount avenue to that aspect of truth which most counts: to apply it to one’s own life. Bernard, inspired by Gregory of Nyssa, outlined 12 degrees of humility, the last of which is the fist degree of truth: to recognize our own misery. The second degree of truth is to love our neighbour and sympathize with his misery. The third degree is to detest our faults and aspire to justice, purifying our heart and enabling it to go out of itself in the contemplation of heavenly things.
Once the Venerable Peter, abbot of Cluny, had Robert Ketton translate the Qur’ân into Latin (in 1141-3), Alan of Lille took up the methodological question of how to approach such an alien religion. in his Art of the Catholic faith he proposes to leave aside appealing to Scripture and the teachings of the Christian faith, since Muslims will not accept this. He admits that Jews and pagans have been converted by miracles, but says “I have not received the grace to do that”. So he tried to construct a rational justification of the Christian faith. In so doing he prefigures the Opus majus of Roger Bacon and the Ars magna of Ramon Lull at the end of the 13th century.
4.4 The high Middle Ages
The intellectual climate of Europe was shaken in the early 13th century by acquaintance with Aristotle’s writings on physics, metaphysics, psychology etc. and commentaries on these writings by Arab philosophers, particularly Ibn-Sînâ. For much the same reasons as Muslim theologians rejected the philosophers in their midst, Church authorities cracked down on the teaching of philosophy, particularly in Paris. But the prohibitions were not absolute, and the works of the philosophers continued to be read even when they were not publicly taught.
The Dominican, Albert the Great (1206-80), a biologist and zoologist in his own right, was also a bishop, a theologian, and was thoroughly familiar with all the philosophical writings of his day. More clearly than any before him, he realized the clear distinction between philosophy and theology, or faith and reason. The Franciscan, Roger Bacon (1214- c. 1293), was an avid student of Ibn-Sînâ, whom he mistakenly took as a representative of the mind of Aristotle on every matter. One such matter was how we know philosophy. Bacon proposed that our knowledge comes directly from God, who is the agent intellect who illumines human minds, a Platonic idea contained in the Liber de causis, wrongly attributed to Aristotle by the Arabs as well as the Latins. On the other hand, Bacon insisted on experience: both sense experience to understand the science of nature, and mystical experience to know God.
In the 13th century the Franciscan, St. Bonaventure, further developed the method of scholastic theology. For him, the subject matter of theology is what a Christian must believe. The proper task of theology, then, is to make matters of faith intelligible by adding reason to it.
The climax of medieval theological and, to a certain extent, philosophical development came with the Dominican saint, Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). Up to the 13th century certain positions of Augustine, deriving from Platonism, held sway in theology. For example, the soul was held to be first of all a spiritual substance, only secondarily related to the body. Consequently illuminationism was unanimously taught, since Platonists could not see how certain knowledge can come through the sense. Thomas saw in Aristotle and Aristotelianism principles and teachings which had a better scientific footing and, consequently, were better suited for use in explaining the Christian faith. The writings of Thomas, therefore, were a revolution in theology. Regarding faith and reason, Thomas saw them as two distinct and independent principles. Nevertheless, they can interact, as when a theologian combines data from faith and from reason to reach a new theological conclusion. Even within the data of faith alone, logic (a branch of philosophy) serves to organize data and see their interrelationship, for example the argument of Paul that Christ’s resurrection is the cause of our resurrection. Furthermore, some of the teachings of faith and of reason overlap, such as the existence of God and some truths about his attributes. Even though these can be known by natural reason they are also revealed because only a few wise men could learn them with accuracy, and that only after a long time, whereas the mysteries of the Kingdom are for all the little ones.
While Arabian philosophy, particularly that of Ibn-Rushd, was being used selectively by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, it was also spreading on its own as a popular part of secular learning. Conflicts soon arose between the theologians and Averroists (followers of Ibn-Rushd). The Archbishop of Paris intervened in 1270 to condemn thirteen errors of Averroism: 1) The intellect of all men is one an numerically identical; 2) Man cannot personally understand; 3) The will of man chooses in a necessary way; 4) All that happens here below is subject to the necessity of the stars and planets; 5) The world is eternal; 6) There never was a first man; 7) The soul, which is the form of man, is corrupted when the body corrupts; 8) After death the separated soul cannot suffer from fire; 9) Free choice is a passive power, not an active one, and is moved with necessity by the desired object; 10) God does not know singulars; 11) God does not know other beings than himself; 12) Human acts are not ruled by the providence of God; 13) God cannot give immortality and incorruption to a mortal and corruptible thing.
The Averroist, Siger de Brabant, gave the impression that these were philosophical matters which did not concern theology. So he was accused of teaching the “double truth”, that something could be true in philosophy and false in theology. In 1277 the Archbishops of Paris and of Canterbury joined in a new condemnation of Averroism, this time listing 219 “errors”, including some of Thomas Aquinas’ teachings. Aquinas was in conflict with Siger de Brabant over some Averroist teachings, yet his extensive use of Aristotle made him seem to other theologians as belonging to the company of the Averroists. The effect of the condemnation of 1277 was to leave Aquinas’ teaching in suspense in the Church until better times, and to turn theology into a more voluntaristic direction (like Islamic Ash'arism), whereby God freely and directly controls the universe without regard for the laws of nature.
4.5 Late scholasticism
In the 14th century a mystical movement flourished once again, led by Master Eckhart, Tauler and Ruysbroeck. The first of these was accused of pantheism for the way he expressed the union of God with the soul. Thomism continued to be studied by a few, particularly among Dominicans who officially adopted his teaching, but Augustinian theology held the day. One of its chief spokesmen was John Duns Scotus (from Scotland, d. 1308).
The 14th century saw the introduction of a new way of thinking, called the “modern way”, which consisted in nominalism, as initiated by William of Ockham (d.c. 1350). Nominalism is a form of philosophical skepticism which takes as its starting point the fact that only singular individual things exist. How then do we get universal ideas? Ockham says that our minds create images common to many things. So-called universal ideas are, for him, nothing more than confused singulars applied to distinct singulars. “Socrates is man” signifies that Socrates distinctly known is Socrates confusedly known. Therefore all science and philosophy of the world deals only with “names” and not the real (universal) natures of things. Reason cannot prove anything; so theology is mere talk about matters of bare faith, which cannot be given any rational understanding.
While Nominalism ran its course up to the 16th century and beyond, Averroism continued to entrench itself in the schools of Paris and Padua. This Averroism was a school closed in on itself and, if we see tension between theologians and Averroists, there was more tension between the Averroists and the innovators of modern physics. Besides these there were the disciples of Bonaventure, of Thomas Aquinas, all so many academic sects competing with one another in the universities.
All this situation came under the severe criticism of the humanists of the 15-16th centuries. Reviving Greek and Latin literature, they were more concerned with literary form than content, and dismissed all scholastic thinking as useless.
Another thinker of importance, Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), attempted to override the confusion in scholasticism with a mixture of philosophy and theology that rejected Aristotelian dialectics and the principle of contradiction and affirmed that in Infinity all contraries co-exist, somewhat as the pre-Socratic Anaxagoras said. A mystical experience of this infinity is all that matters; so all arguments among the schools are cast to the wind. The consequences of this disillusionment with reason would be felt in the religious turmoil of the 16th century.
4.6 The modern period
Luther, as an Augustinian friar, was given a training in nominalist philosophy and theology. He later joined the humanists in rejecting scholasticism altogether. But his distrust of all human learning alienated his humanist supporters as well.
The new science, started by Nicholas Copernicus (d. 1543), Tycho Brahe (d. 1601), Johann Kepler (d. 1631), Galileo Galilei (d. 1642), Boyle (d. 1691) and Isaac Newton (d. 1727), for a time was opposed by Church leaders as well as the Averroist Aristotelians of Padua.
As we saw in the last chapter, mystical movements, both in Catholicism and Protestantism, were often an escape from the exercise of reason and the problems raised by the speculations of scientists and philosophers.
Descartes (1596-1649), putting some old ideas together in a new form, marked a turning point in the history of philosophy and in thought about the relationship between faith and reason. His method of universal doubt and his “Cogito ergo sum” are well known. Underlying all his thought, however, is the assumption that the first thing we know is ideas, not things. Then he had to face the problem of how ideas adequately represent things. Building a bridge between ideas and things then became the major preoccupation of philosophers from the English empiricists through Kant and Hegel to our time. Descartes is also responsible for the separation of philosophy (henceforward truncated to logic and metaphysics) and science.
The discoveries of the astronomers and physicists, once understood, did not disquiet theologians very much; they adapted their theology to heliocentrism. The major challenge to theology from science in modern times came from Charles Darwin (1809-82), whose botanical and zoological research led him to propose the theory of natural evolution. The idea was later extended to the whole cosmos, and the first chapters of Genesis were called into question. The arguments on this question were for a long time very bitter, but advances in Scripture studies in the past century have given a new basis for understanding the first chapter of Genesis as a literary parable. The author affirmed God as the origin and master of all creation and teaches the distinct dignity of man, but did not intend to say how God gave the universe its shape. At the same time, Church authorities have reaffirmed that the human soul is created directly by God and cannot evolve from a lower form of life. The question is no longer a problem for many mainline Churches, but fundamentalists still argue the question vehemently.
4.7 Contemporary times
Christian faith in contemporary times has had several major challenges which can only be mentioned here:
Modernism was a movement in the 19th century which speculated on the data of comparative religion, which was just then becoming well popular, and concluded that religion emerges from the common psyche of mankind in different cultural forms, and not from above by way of revelation. This was condemned by Pope Pius X.
Atheistic Communism is a merging of the dialectical method of Hegel and the materialism of Feuerbach. It did not represent much of an intellectual threat to Christianity but, as the official ideology of many countries for much of the 20th century, it suppressed Christianity and other religions by force.
Phenomenology, represented chiefly by Husserl, skirts the question of whether ideas represent real things and attempts to analyze the data of consciousness. Similar to this is the philosophy of linguistic analysis, represented by Wittgenstein. Either movement, developed to extreme skepticism and agnosticism, is a challenge to Christian faith, but in fact there has been a fertile dialogue between theologians and the philosophers of these movements.
Existentialism, started by Kierkegaard, at first represented attention to the problems of life in reaction against dry dogmas. It became popular in World War II, expressing the despair of many people. It challenged Christian faith when it turned to an atheistic nihilism, inspired by Nietsche. Such thinking is less common today.
The abandonment of Christianity in many of its former strongholds is due mainly to materialistic thinking reinforced by mistrust of human reason to know anything about truth, especially metaphysical or spiritual truth.