Published in A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Etienne
Gilson, edited by Peter Redpath
(Value Books Series; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 177-91.
James V. Schall, S. J.
Georgetown University, DC, 20057-1200, 3 D15c15mb15r 2001
“POSSESSED OF BOTH A REVELATION AND A REASON”
“If
... we learn from medieval theologians what is faith in an objective truth and
what is an objective philosophical knowledge, we shall find ourselves possessed
of both a Revelation and a Reason.
There then will be something
to harmonize, and anyone attempting to do it will end at last in meeting the
real problem.”
–
Etienne Gilson, Richards Lecture, University of Virginia, 1937.1
“The
Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular
philosophy in preference to others.
The underlying reason for this reluctance is that, even when it engages
theology, philosophy must remain faithful to its own principles and methods.... At the deepest level, the autonomy which
philosophy enjoys is rooted in the fact that reason is by its nature oriented
to truth and is equipped moreover with the means necessary to arrive at
truth. A philosophy conscious of
this as its ‘constitutive status’ cannot but respect the demands and the data
of revealed truth.”
–
John Paul II, Fides et Ratio,
1998, #49.
“On
this very morning, Monday, June 11, 1950, I returned to the writing of this
article after reading in a current Parisian daily the following words: ‘The
Church possesses a philosophical doctrine that is proper to her, that to make
Christians that are subject to her teaching, this is what the Church requires
before anything else.’ No, the
Church does not have a ‘philosophical’ doctrine that is proper to her, but she
has a faith that is proper to her....”
–
Etienne Gilson, “Wisdom and Time.”2
I.
In
the summer of 1926, Etienne Gilson was invited to teach summer school at the
University of Virginia at Charlottesville. This was his first visit to the United States. His friend, Professor Albert G. A.
Balz, had invited him to give two lecture courses, one “The Development of
Thought from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Centuries,” the second, “The
Evolution of French Thought since the Sixteenth Century.”3 Gilson, haltingly learning English at
the time, seems to have enjoyed this visit and these students. When he came to give the Richards
Lecture in Charlottesville in 1937, his “Foreword” specifically recalls these
earlier summer school students, who “helped me through a difficult task.” One can hardly overestimate the debt
that American and Canadian scholarship owes to all those students and faculty
who helped Gilson become familiar with academic life and language on these
shores.
Balz
had suggested that the theme for the Richards Lecture might be “Scripture and
Authority in Medieval Thought.”
However, Gilson had something else in mind.
This
subject (reason and revelation in the middle ages) allowed Gilson to return to
the challenging theme of
double truth associated with the much-maligned Siger of Brabant. He had dealt with the theme once before
(“La doctrine de la double vérité,” in Etudes
de philosophie médiévale. Strasbourg, 1931) and was anxious to try again in the
light of his own The Unity of Philosophical Experience and especially of (Jacques) Maritain’s Distinguer
pour unier, which had made a strong
attempt to bring faith and knowledge into organic unity.4
The Richards Lecture is startling in its scope and in
its concise brevity. Indeed, in
the light of its treatment of Muslim thought and of what happens to philosophy
itself or theology when either declares its own absolute autonomy, Gilson’s
book remains remarkably contemporary.
“You
will not civilize a tribe of Bedouins by teaching them metaphysics,” Gilson
soberly quipped in 1937.5
Needless to say, this very issue has not been completely resolved even
yet. Presumably, Gilson had no
objection to teaching metaphysics to natives of any sort, even academic
American ones, if it were possible, but he was quite clear in practice that
something more than pure metaphysics was first needed, a sort of perambula
metaphysicae. One only needs to recall here the
reason given in The Crito for
Socrates’ not accepting banishment to Thessaly, to an uncivilized kingdom,
namely that one requires a certain sophisticated civilization to talk
metaphysics in the first place, otherwise the philosopher is a mere spectacle
for the entertainment of the barbarian king and his companions (45c).
What
Gilson brings up in the Richards Lecture is the very nature of metaphysics in
Islam and, more particularly, since the Bedouins are not philosophers, though
Avicenna and Averroes are, of the revelation of Allah, of the nature of this
Allah expressed in philosophical terms.
The problem of the “two truths,” of a truth of reason and a truth of
revelation that can contradict each other, remains among us as the background
to our current world-wide political turmoil. Rereading the Richards Lecture more than six decades after
it was originally given brings up in a graphic manner the often obscure
relationship between the politician and the philosopher, a relationship that
was, of course, at the heart of philosophy itself as the life and death of
Socrates continually teaches us.
The problem of Christian martyrs in Islamic countries is not totally
unrelated to this same question.6
And
what may be an issue even more profound
than that of the philosopher and the politician, is the relation of
revelation to theologians who seek to interpret revelation solely in terms of
this world and its closed ideologies or philosophies. Indeed, the question is more to the fore in efforts to
achieve all the ends of Christian revelation, ie, salvation, without any
influence of this same revelation, without any reference to its doctrine or
practice.7 Gilson understood what was at
stake: “To any sincere
believer who is at the same time a true philosopher, the slightest opposition
between his faith and his reason is a sure sign that something is the matter
with his philosophy.”8
If, by contrast, we can define theological “modernity,” we might say
that it is when the slightest opposition between faith and reason occurs, we
think that there is something wrong with theology or faith, not our
reason.
“We
are compelled to distinguish political philosophy from political theology,” Leo
Strauss wrote in 1959. “By
political theology, we understand political teachings which are based on divine
revelation. Political philosophy
is limited to what is accessible to the unassisted human mind.”9 We are equally “compelled” to wonder,
on reading these lines in the light of Gilson, whether we are forbidden to
compare, relate, and reflect, once we have brought them out, on the political
teachings found in revelation with what “unassisted reason” comes up with? Surely, without violating the
integrity of either revelation or reason, we are not “compelled” to let the two
bodies of knowledge simply sit there unrelated? This bringing them together would involve two questions: “to what extent can we ‘understand’
what we do not believe?” And “why
is what we do not believe sometimes, at least, in agreement with what we learn
by our ‘unassisted reason’?”10 And if we cannot ask such questions, why not? We are, in fact, “compelled” to ask
them.
How
one might confront these latter questions of faith and reason might well still
have something to do with Aristotle, the Philosopher, as St. Thomas called
him. Indeed, in his discussion of
Averroes, Gilson pointed out that philosophy was not necessarily to be
identified as such with everything Aristotle held, as Averroes seemed to
think. Averroes assumed this
identity between philosophy and the literal Aristotelian teaching because he considered
his own revelation, that of Islam, to be at best a myth for the guidance of the
masses of Bedouins and others who could not be philosophers.11 On the other hand, “Thomas Aquinas
would follow Aristotle when he was right, but no further, and because he was
right.”12 Since
philosophy itself was not identical with Aristotle, even though Aristotle was
the greatest of the philosophers and had it mostly right, it would be possible
to learn at least some philosophical things indirectly from revelation when one
came to consider the truth of Aristotle’s propositions as they related or did
not relate to this same revelation..
Moreover,
as much of the modern world was built on a specific philosophical rejection of
Aristotle, it seems incumbent to reconsider Aristotle precisely because of the
relativism and skepticism that have come to dominate modern philosophy in his
absence. “The very rise of
so-called modern science and modern philosophy,” Henry Veatch well observed,
was originally associated – certainly in the minds of men like
Galileo and Descartes – with a
determined repudiation of Aristotle: it was precisely his influence which it
was thought necessary to destroy, root and branch, before what we now know as
science and philosophy in the modern mode could get off the ground. Accordingly, could it be that as so
many of us today are turning our backs so bitterly on all the hitherto boasted
achievements of modern culture, we might find ourselves inclined, indeed
perhaps even compelled, to return to the Aristotelianism that both antedated
and was considered antithetical to the whole modern experiment in knowledge and
in living?13
Veatch too was “compelled.” There is a double irony here. It is precisely those things in Aristotle that needed
correcting in order for the valid parts of modern science to be discovered that
came about because of the influence of revelation on our understanding of the
world. The themes of a definite
beginning, of a stable set of secondary causes, and of the need to investigate
empirically that made science possible are ideas that owed their origins to
revelation.14
Thomas’ agreeing with Aristotle “when he was right” and not just because
he was Aristotle serves in its own way to distinguish
understandings not susceptible to ideology from those
that are.
II.
Etienne
Gilson was conscious of the real, though often difficult to prove, relationship
between the events of the mind and those of subsequent public order or
disorder. The wars of the world
are usually fought out previously in the minds and hearts of the clerical and
academic dons before they ever appear in legislatures or on fields of
battle. Incomplete or erroneous
ideas of the mind of one generation or era would be taken up later in different
places and in different ways.
“Philosophers are free to lay down their own set of principles,” Gilson
had observed the previous year at
Harvard where he gave the William James Lecture at the 300th
Anniversary of that university’s founding,
but once this is done, they no
longer think as they wish – they
think as they can.... It seems to
result from the facts under discussion, that any attempt on the part of a
philosopher to shun the consequences of his own position is doomed to failure. What he himself declines to say will be
said by his disciples, if he has any; if he has none, it may remain eternally
unsaid; but it is there, and anybody going back to the same principles, be it
several centuries later, will have to face the same conclusion....15
The traditional notion in popular opinion of the
uselessness of the philosopher, of which Plato spoke in Book VI of The
Republic, gains a sobering corrective
in Gilson’s careful words to the audience in Harvard. We betray our culture, we do not know what animates it, if
we are ignorant of the ideas, especially aberrant ideas, on which it is founded
or by which it comes to act. But
if error will not let us alone, unexamined, neither will the truth of
things. The very articulation of
an erroneous position is itself a challenge to some philosopher down the ages
to get it right. This is the
import of Socrates’ praise of the two young philosophers in the beginning of
the second book of The Republic,
who could explain error so well but who knew that there was something wrong
with their explanation and hence needed Socrates to explain things to them.
Philosophy
and revelation have different origins.
One of the attractions of particularly Greek philosophy is precisely
that it has, apparently, nothing but itself to explain itself. It was not open or closed; it was
itself. It dealt with whatever was
at hand, including myths and stories.
To many, it seemed, after they had been rediscovered by the various
schools of believers in the Middle Ages, that Plato and Aristotle must have
known, in order to say what they did, the contents of the Hebrew bible. The fact is, however, that they did not
know this source. Certainly,
someone like St. Paul knew of philosophical things, both to warn of their dangers
and to prod the Romans for not knowing what they could know. But though there were certain universal
elements in Hebrew revelation, still theirs was largely the affair of a small
and obscure people in an out of the way corner of the world.
We
might debate whether the “intent” of world history in some Hegelian sense is
that these differing civilizations, Athens and Jerusalem, come into contact
with each other. What cannot be
doubted is that, after Alexander the Great and the Roman presence in the New
Testament itself, they did confront each other. The first question for Christians was merely how could they
live peacefully within the Roman Empire.
When Augustine comes along, he is quite prepared to justify Christianity
because its believers make good
citizens and soldiers of Rome.
While remaining “wayfarers and pilgrims” in this world, they do not
alienate themselves, as later thinkers would charge, but provide the incentives
whereby the world could be most itself.
What
Gilson is concerned with in the Richards Lecture, however, is the history of
efforts to relate revelation and reason in some coherent unity, one that does
justice both to reason and revelation, one that explicates their exact scope. He suggests that in fact this coherent
unity was worked out but rejected almost before it had a chance to flourish in
the time of Thomas Aquinas --
hence it is still waiting to be rediscovered. But at the tine, this failure had something to do with
intellect. To this point, Gilson
writes in his Charlottesville lecture:
Had it been given to Thomas
Aquinas to convince, if not his own contemporaries, at least his immediate
successors, the intellectual and moral crisis would have soon come to a close,
and the whole history of western thought would have been different from what it
was. Unfortunately, the net result
of Averroes’ influence was to breed in the minds of the theologians a growing
mistrust for philosophy. If that
(Averroes’ view) was natural reason, Revelation would be better off without its
help than with it. Hence, in even
the greatest among the late medieval philosophers and theologians, an
increasing tendency to ascribe to faith alone, not only what Thomas Aquinas
would call the articles of faith properly said, but even what we saw him define
as rational preambles to matters of faith. It thus came to pass that the list of the revealed truths
that can be either believed, or proved, was steadily growing shorter and
shorter to the point of shrivelling into nothingness.16
When this “nothingness” was reached, what was left was
a pure fideism on the one hand, and modern science on the other.17 From Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes,
Hobbes and on to the present, we begin to see that no religion can be excluded
from revelation and no religious position can be touched by science which is
itself an arbitrary restructuring of the world according to human needs and
wants with no restriction from a fixed human nature.18 Indeed, a good part of modern science
is concerned with the problem of whether there even is a world other than its
thought about the world.
What
Gilson set out to do in the University of Virginia lecture was, effectively, to
restore reason by restoring revelation to its proper content and role. Whether reason “could” save itself by
itself was a separate question, but Nietzsche’s answer in Beyond Good and
Evil that reason in fact did not save
itself has haunted modern thought ever since.19 The 1945 and 1989 rejection and defeat
of the leading twentieth century ideologies that became powerful political
movements, however, did not evidently return the culture to an openness to revelation. Rather it established doubt, the
impossibility of knowing anything at all, at the heard of all intellectual
things.
The
astonishing reappearance of Islam in 2001 as a militant factor, moreover,
itself takes the form of an ideology based on nothing more fundamental than the
arbitrary will of Allah and hence the impossibility of stable secondary causes
and science itself. Indeed, the
“fury” of Islam was often described as a kind of frustration at its own
impotence before the West, before what it often called “Satan.” The West was perceived as precisely
corrupt and decadent so that all that was needed to topple it was zeal and
shrewd use of arms and weapons that anyone with some training could handle. The struggle within Islam itself was
about its truth, about the connection between its marginalization in the modern
world and its religious beliefs, about the intellectual foundations that are
claimed in its support.
III.
Gilson
begins his examination with the first encounters of revelation and philosophy,
those that suppose that revelation makes philosophy unnecessary, if not
dangerous. We associate this
initial position in particular with Tertullian, whose famous aphorism, “What
has Jerusalem to do with Athens?,” has itself become, in the hands of Leo
Strauss, an instrument of restoring both philosophy and revelation to serious
consideration, though within what must be suspected, at least at first sight,
of bearing Averroistic overtones.
Strauss, without denying the reality of either, seems to have denied any
possible encounter or cross-fertilization between reason and revelation.20 He “protected” revelation not, as
Aquinas did, by recognizing at least some elements of revelation that could
also be examined by genuine philosophy, but rather by setting the way of life
of the philosopher and the way of life as the prophet or priest in radically
different worlds. Whether this
separation served to protect either revelation or reason can be questioned
since it admitted the possibility of two bodies of “truths” that had no means
of contacting one another. On the
other hand, to his credit, in an academic world that had forgotten the origins
of its own meaning, Strauss at least enabled the question of revelation to
appear as a legitimate, if perplexing, one.21
The
second great approach that began to realize the faith and reason might have
more to do with one another than simple opposition was that of Augustine. Augustine was a seeker of truth,
wherever it might be found. As a
young man, he was almost a classical potential philosopher of the Platonic
variety. Beautiful things in which
he sought beauty itself deceived him until he found his way. “Augustine was never to forget,” Gilson
wrote,
that the safest way to reach truth
is not the one that starts from reason and then goes on from rational certitude
to faith, but, on the contrary the way whose starting point is faith and then
goes on from Revelation to reason.
By reaching that unexpected conclusion, Augustine was opening a new era
in the history of western thought.
No Greek philosopher could have ever dreamt of making religious faith in
some revealed truth the obligatory starting point to rational knowledge.22
Augustine realized that belief was one of the things
that led him to understanding, especially the understanding of what it was all
about, of the highest things.
Henceforth, there would be a constant effort in Christian thought to
find that philosophy to which faith naturally led. The only problem with this sort of approach, in Gilson’s
view, was that if one did not accept the initial premise of faith, no matter
how philosophic or logical everything flowed from the faith, it could not reach
or have anything in common with a non-believing philosophy. The latter is now understand for the
first time as being its own autonomous field. Hitherto, philosophy had been open to whatever is, from what
ever source.
Thus
the second type of relation of revelation and reason, typified by Averroes, was
the view that philosophy was a higher science than revelation and indeed
subsumed it into itself by explaining what religion was. A philosophy that could “explain”
religion was higher than religion.
The “truths” of faith were not “mysteries” but :”myths” that could be
explained by the wise man, by the philosopher. It followed from this position that the revelation of Islam,
in this case, could not be seen as compatible with philosophy as explicated by
Aristotle, who is now taken as himself literally explaining what the human mind
by itself could hold including religion.
The Aristotelian positions that were contrary even to Islamic faith,
say, the eternality of the world as opposed to creation, were thus seen as
philosophically determinative.
Reason corrected revelation or reduced it to myth.
What
happened in this system? Averroes
developed a three fold relationship to philosophy. There were the great masses who did not understand it; there
were the dialecticians who understood mathematics, and there were the
philosophers who understood Aristotle.
Nothing in the Koran could be taken seriously except that which had to
do with an exhortation to live a good life, which Aristotle already understood
and explicated long before the Koran ever appeared.. The Koran thus became a kind of Platonic myth simplified for
the good of those could not understand.
Submission to the Koran was a blind obedience that precluded any
examination of what might be commanded in its name. No “natural law” had to be wrestled with.
The
theologians who were in charge of this myth were to be left alone. The philosopher was simply to set them
aside and not bother explaining what the real situation was. It could only cause problems, even
persecution – Averroes himself
died in exile. Indeed, it was perhaps best not even to write or speak of
philosophy in public. Philosophy
could not be explained to everyone, so it was not necessary to bother trying to
do so. Religion served its purpose
by providing a sort of substitute philosophy for the masses that served
political purposes in keeping the masses in order. But none of the truths of philosophy could be confronted by
those of revelation. They belonged
to different orders.23
The philosopher alone knew and understood. His way was a lonely way.
The
Christian version of this system had vast ramifications. It was again a variety of absolute
separation between philosophy and revelation. Aristotle himself did not develop a philosophy which was in
“response” to some revelation, though he did, as did Plato, deal with the traditional
gods and stories of the Greeks. In
this sense, the Aristotle “as Aristotle” that Aquinas sought to encounter, the
Aristotle not interpreted or explained by Arab philosophy, could still be
“open” to a revelation that he did not know. Aquinas’ Aristotle was not open in the sense of Augustine’s
searching for intelligence, though that too, but open in the sense of an
open-ended philosophic reflection that could be right or wrong depending on
philosophy itself, and not simply on the fact that Aristotle said it.
The
case of the Latin Averroists however presupposed a philosophy that is closed in
on itself, a rationalism as it would be called. The line of nominalism from Scotus to Occam to Marsilius of
Padua to Hobbes and into modernity is based on a break between what is and what we know. Ideas were not to be abstracted from real things. There were only words. Each thing was different. Gilson doubts if it is exactly
fair to call Siger of Brabant, the most famous name associated with Latin
Averroism, a pure model for of the system itself. What happened, however, was that there was no link between
faith and reason whatsoever. Faith
did not search “reason.” Reason
was its own world. If its positions contradicted revelation, which it
presumably did, that only meant that there were two separate spheres of reality
with two separate system of “truths.”
So long as there was still belief, philosophy could perhaps still be
challenged, though with fewer points of contact. But with the loss of any belief, what is left is a reason
not limited to its own truth, but an autonomous reason, a reason whose
self-enclosed circlings had no other source but itself. It could not even be open to the notion
that there was an order in things that itself revealed traces of mind, at least
a divine mind.
Of
this earlier form of rationalism’s significance, Gilson wrote: “The existence of a medieval
rationalism should never be forgotten by those historians who are investigating
into the origins of the so-called modern rationalism, for indeed the
Averroistic tradition forms an uninterrupted chain from the Masters of Arts of
Paris, to the “Libertins” of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”24 Gilson even suggests that St. Thomas himself would not have
been possible without the Averroistic challenge since it was that challenge
that incited him to clarify the proper relation of reason and revelation..
However,
we might add, that the unresolved philosophic problem in Islam itself is at the
origins of many of our current problems, including the broader problem of the
relation of Christianity to any classic religion to itself. If it is true, as Stanley Jaki has
argued, that part of our present problem is the inferiority complex in Islam
over the fact that it has not been able to enter into the modern scientific and
political basis on the basis of its own theology, the reason for this is not
due to some brain deficiency on the part of Arab thinkers.25 Rather it is because of Gilson’s
principle that once we lay down our first principles, we no longer think was we
want, but as we can. Averroes
himself evidently attempted to protect philosophy not only from Islamic
theology, by his distinction of three classes of people who have nothing to do
with each other, but also from an Aristotle who was not closed in on
himself.
If
Allah is pure will and piety means submission to Allah, then it is absolutely
impossible for there to be any such thing as stable secondary causes or even
such a thing as a world itself since God could make contradictories
possible. It is sometimes argued
that one of the strength of Islam is its simplicity, its few precepts that
almost anyone can obey. But if the
world is not that simple, if God is more complex than Allah’s absolute will, if
Incarnation is possible, if secondary causes really can act, it follows that
the argument with Islam is not simply about a goodly number of fanatics but its
very understanding of its God.26 The failure of Islamic philosophers to save the world while
sending its armies on the mission of conquering it, turns out to have been of
momentous contemporary importance.
IV.
Gilson
then recalls that it might be possible to find an understanding of philosophy
and of revelation that accepts the truth of revelation and its content while at
the same time accepting the truths of philosophy as philosophy. But this position cannot avoid
suggesting that not every philosophy is true. Indeed, faith seeks understanding, even in the order of
understanding. The crucial issue
is that of the order of things.27 The importance of Thomas Aquinas is the ability to “handle
philosophical problems as a philosopher and theological problems as a
theologian.”28
Gilson explains that the conclusion that something is true on the basis
of faith is due to the testimony of God.
What I know as true in this sense is not the result of a rational
analysis or understanding, by which I also may discover something as true. This dependence on faith also means
that those truths that are specifically of faith are intended for every
believer and not just for the intellectuals or theologians. “All believers, all Christians are in
the same predicament, for all of them agree as to what they believe, and none
of them has any scientifically knowledge.”29 This is specifically what sets the Christian apart from
Averroes and his school.
But
is there then no contact between reason and revelation, granted the autonomy of
both and the separate origins of their truth? Aquinas did not accept this “absolute” separation of
reason and revelation and this, in part, on philosophic grounds. The good sense contained in revelation
might indeed be persuasive and consistent, but it would convince only those who
accepted the basis of faith and its authority.30 The real problem was whether Averroes
and his tradition understood Aristotle properly, and even more basically,
whether they understood philosophy properly. If we consider Aristotle to be a great philosopher but that
he might have erred, then we will need a philosophy, not theology, to show this
error, even if our suspicion that there was an error did arise from
theology. Aquinas could see that
an idea could not be intellectually consistent but still not true. He could not be content with a divided
soul for that shattered the whole order of creation, the whole order of things.31
Yet,
because of Aquinas’ particular awareness both of theological foundations and
philosophical arguments, he realized that certain elements that appeared in
faith also were open to philosophical discourse, the existence of God, the
order of morality, for example.
This affinity was peculiar and surprising if there was indeed an
absolute separation of reason and revelation. Likewise, there were positions in revelation that, according
to revelation itself, were beyond human reason, though they were part of the
wisdom of God and hence not, ultimately, contradictory to being. Philosophic speculation could not
“prove” that there was a Trinity in the Godhead, though it might examine
arguments that maintained that it was impossible to show their own dubiousness.32
It
is to be remembered that the purpose of revelation is very specific. It is not intended to answer all
unanswered questions. Indeed, it is related to the question of whether everyone
is a “philosopher.” One of the
ironies of Greek philosophy had been that the highest branches of philosophy
could in practice be reached only by a few. In Islam, if the general believer only had an untrue “myth”
to keep him politically settled, as Averroes seemed to maintain, then the
presumed transcendent destiny of the believers was based on nothing at
all. “For this is the proper aim
and scope of Revelation to provide all men, philosophers or not, with such
knowledge of God, of man, and of his destiny, as is required for their eternal
salvation.”33
In this sense, it can be suggested that revelation is an “answer” to
Greek philosophy. It does not
replace philosophy or denigrate it in any way, but it does propose a possible
solution to an enigma inherent in Greek philosophy, something still in another
way in Averroes. Moreover, the
salvation of real men in a real world does indicate the need of philosophical
positions that can defend the world as existing and the real responsibility of
those found within it.
The
upshot of Aquinas’ position that there were certain truths within the corpus of
revelation that were also verified or found in philosophy hinted at the unity
of the whole of truth. The source
that contained some truths that could be verified is quite in a different
status from one that holds an absolute separation of reason and revelation on
ideological grounds. Revelation is
indeed open to reason, in that it accounts for at least some reasonable things. A reason that is not able to answer all
its own questions on its own terms is simply honest as a philosophy when it is
stimulated by theology.
Gilson
comments on the history of philosophy after Aquinas, beginning with Scotus,
that, because of the tendency to minimize the relation of faith and reason,
both areas of knowledge were independent of each other, to the detriment of
both.34 “A bitter
opponent of Duns Scotus, Occam always maintained that absolutely nothing could
be proved about God in the light of natural reason, not even His
existence. To him, as to Averroes,
what reason can say concerning theological matters never goes beyond the order
of mere dialectical probability.”35 Gilson, in fact, dates the end of the Middle Ages to that
point when there is despair of reconciling in any way reason and revelation.36 Gilson sees the mystic tradition in
part to be an attempt to save realism.
A’Kempis and Luther, however, both seemed to agree in the rejection of
philosophy.37
“After the Reformation and the Humanists, the men of the sixteenth
century found themselves confronted with a theology without philosophy, the positive or modern
philosophy of Fr. de Vitoria and of M. Cano; and of a philosophy without
theology: the purely rational speculations of R.
Descartes and Francis Bacon.”38 It was out of this background that the notions of the
specifically “modern project” (Strauss) of a world of improving the human
estate by human powers alone arose.
Gilson’s
conclusions are in two steps. The
first is a reminder of his basic insight into the importance of the history of
philosophy: “The history of ideas is determined from within by the internal
necessity of ideas themselves.”39 The issues of reason and revelation will remain
substantially the same. The second
step concerns the substance of peculiarly Christian revelation that at point
after point encounters legitimate philosophical questions unanswered by
philosophy itself. The real issue
is this:
Knowing ... that He who is more
than Prophet has spoken, what are we to do with this message? If what His message says does at times
escape the grasp of natural reason, what is natural reason going to say about
it? Once we have reached that
point, God can no longer be conceived by us as a mere “wholly other” to which
our a priori category of the
“Numinous” bears witness; the Son also is a witness, and He has said who the
Father is. That, at last, is a
Revelation worthy of the name: not
our own revelation of God to ourselves, but the revelation of God Himself to
us.40
Gilson’s point, it seems, is not merely that this is
the “content” of revelation, this Son and Father, the general terms of which
any serious reader might see to be there in revelation’s documents, but that
this revelation in its curious content, in its Trinity and Incarnation and all
the teachings that go with it, does meet a genuine philosophy that has argued
to the existence of God and His major attributes. This
approach is not “proving” theology by reason, which would be a heresy and a
divine claim on the part of the human mind. Nor is it arguing to the genuineness of philosophy beginning
with faith and dialectics. Rather
it is preserving what is theology and what is philosophy in a mutual openness,
typical of Aristotle’s own philosophy, as Aquinas understood it. This openness would not reject any
truth merely on the grounds that it did not come from reason alone. Reason is open to all truth, not just
to its own taken in the rationalistic sense. Faith remains a gift, but a gift also to reason that stands
curious about itself, about its own questions when it hears at least the
outlines of what is said to be revealed to it, to reason. In wrestling with this unexpected
source, reason strangely becomes more itself, more philosophical. And in this mode, it is, as Aquinas
called it, a “handmaid” itself quite needed to prevent theology, without it,
from inventing its own groundless ideologies.
In
conclusion, it is perhaps in this context that we can reconsider Leo Strauss’
enigmatic words in 1964, when he spoke in Jerusalem about “the Divine message
of the City of Righteousness, the Faithful City.” Strauss thought that to speak of this “city” “among the
heathen,” it was necessary to understand the “outlines” of this “city,” as much
as possible, by our own natural powers, a project Aquinas certainly would
accept. To elaborate this
description, political science in particular has, in Strauss’ view, much less
need of the “indispensable handmaid” of theology as of “political philosophy as
the rightful queen of the social sciences.”41 The question is, of course, in the
light of Augustine’s “City of God,” whether “the rightful queen of the social
sciences” will retain its proper place as the highest of the practical sciences
but not the highest of the sciences as such, in which case it would become itself
a metaphysics.
In the light of these reflections on Gilson’s understanding of reason and revelation, however, in the light of the history of philosophy as itself the presence of ideas that need to be resolved in the name of truth, we might suggest, as Strauss knew in his description of positivism and historicism, that social science itself is a product of this very modernity from Descartes and Bacon, indeed from Occam and de Vitoria, from Averroes and Tertullian, ideas that did not understand the proper relation of Athens and Jerusalem. One might well argue that the whole modern history of the West, the whole thesis of John Paul’s Fides et Ratio, is to recommence that insight into reason and revelation that Thomas Aquinas hammered out but which subsequent generations, to their peril, did not pursue. Gilson’s Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages brings us back to these considerations, perhaps not a minute too soon, even though we have neglected it for lo, these many decades since Gilson was in Charlottesville, in Virginia..
1Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation
in the Middle Ages (New York:
Scribner’s, 1938), 99. Italics
added. (Henceforth, this book will
be cited as RRMA.)
5RRMA, 43. It is of some interest that at almost the same time, Hilaire
Belloc was writing on this same subject of the importance and nature of Islam,
“The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed,” The Great Heresies (New York: Sheed & Ward, MCMXXXVIII), 71-140.
6See sections on Islam in Robert Royal, The
Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive World History (New York: Crossroad, 2000); Peter Marshall, Their
Blood Cries Out: Untold Story of Persecution against Christians in the Modern
World (Dallas: Word, 1997).
7See Josef Ratzinger, “Dominus Jesus,” The
Pope Speaks, (August 6, 2000), 46
(January/February, 2001), 33-56.
See James V. Schall, “On Being Faithful to Revelation,” Homiletic and
Pastoral Review, CI (March, 2001),
22-31.
9Leo Strauss, “What Is Political
Philosophy?” What Is Political Philosophy and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1959), 13.
10See Ralph McInerny, St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982),
145-65.
13Henry Veatch, Aristotle: A
Contemporary Appreciation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 4.
14See Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science
and the Ways to God (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978).
15Etienne Gilson, The Unity of
Philosophical Experience (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, [1937] 1999), 243.
17See James V. Schall, “Protestantism and
Atheism,” Redeeming the Time (New
York: Sheed & Ward, 1968), 97-120.
20Leo Strauss, “Jerusalem and Athens: Some
Preliminary Reflections,” text found in Susan Orr, Jerusalem and Athens:
Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss (Lanham, MD.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 179-208.
21See Thomas Pangle, “Introduction,” Leo
Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 18-23;
James V. Schall, Reason, Revelation and the Foundations of Political
Philosophy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1987), 182-224.
25Stanley Jaki, “On Whose Side Is History?”
Chance or Reality and Other Essays
(Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1986) 233-44; “The Physics of
Impetus and the Impetus of the Koran,” The Absolute Beneath the Relative and
Other Essays (Lanham, MD.: University
Press of America, 1988), 14-52.
26See the discussion of Islam in James V.
Schall, “Introduction: The Home, the Crown, and the Cross: On Explaining
Humanity to Itself,” in G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 25-27.