I encourage you to read the first part in this series. If that is too much like reading an introduction or preface to the main body of a book, then a summary is in order. Previously, we discussed briefly how the Black Death, Copernican Revolution, and nominalism contributed to the beginning shift from the Medieval to Modern Age.
Christendom is in the dark night.
“Do not go gentle into that good night…”
The dark sun of modernity is creeping up from its odious abode, the predawn of the Age of Reason is about to emanate downward over Western civilization.
“…Rage, rage against the dying of the light”
One hopes that Hume is right, that there is no certainty that the sun will rise, even though it has risen every morning. Or at least the sun of modernity will never rise again. Alas! It has for several centuries. And modernity as a philosophical system has dethroned the classical Christian worldview (even the term worldview is in itself a modern term) supplanting it with a culture constructed upon the sands of human reason. The above verses are from Dylan Thomas, and they come to mind as I was preparing for this post. One can say that–despite the fact that we are centuries deep into modernity–that Christendom is still glowing. The fire still burns faintly. The hyperbolic and horrific language I used to paint the picture of Christendom in decline and the usurpation by modernity does not presuppose that Christendom is dead and buried. The (post)modern conversation is still happening within the context of a culture shaped by Christianity; essentially, they are conversations still within that socio-religious framework, regardless of all the talk of science. When scientists appeal to a higher principle, that is religious language, albeit it has roots in pre-Christian philosophy, but it also has roots in pre-Christian Judaism (just read Philo and the wisdom literature of second-temple Judaism), these threads were eventually woven into the fabric of Christianity. All this to say, that the light still flickers. And it can be rekindled. Let us be creators of an authentic Christian culture (and not the ghettoized, reactionary subculture of conservative Protestantism that dominated the Christian scene the last several decades). Let us cultivate the fertile ground for future generations. Let us rage against the dying of the light.
To do this we must recognize what’s foreign to our Holy Tradition and eradicate it. There is much that has hitchhiked its way into the Church that originates in modernity. The great heresy our time is modernism, which has produced secularism, rationalism, nihilism, ecumenism, etc. These tend to come as a package. We must first recognize where these have attached themselves. Descartes is a good place to begin.
Setting the Stage
Before understanding Descartes’ contribution to philosophy, one must have a basic grasp of the Scholastic doctrine of the human person. The Scholastics adapted Aristotle’s hylomorphism to Christianity. Aristotle was the first to distinguish between matter and form (hyle and morphe, respectively). Matter is the thing from which things develop. Form is best understood as the essence of something, or as John Vervaeke describe it, the structural, functional organization, or simply understood, it gives “form” to the matter, it’s what makes a cow a cow, it’s cowness. Applied to man, the soul is a form, or put another way, it’s related to the body as form is to matter. The Scholastics adapted this and it became known as the doctrine of substantial forms. The essence of man, what man truly is, what makes him what he is, is his soul. The body was in the soul. Personhood was much different for them then it was for us. The person was a union of soul and body in relation to the Trinity. The human person emphatically is not an autonomous individual.
This development happened post-Schism, so this language is not seen in the Eastern Fathers quite to the degree as in the West. Orthodoxy did employee terminology from the same sources as did the Latin West, however, the Greek tradition preferred to use terms such as ousia, hypostasis, physis. Man is understood as the hypostasis of nature and accidents, or the hypostasis concretizes nature, the who and the what are made sensible and intelligible in the hypostasis. The idea of prime matter being actualized by form into some thing, is found more within Western Christianity, if it is within the Orthodox East, I have yet to find it explained as such. The closest one finds to Scholasticism in pre-Schism Christianity is Sts. Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, the latter is the culmination of the Orthodox patristic tradition and the point of transition to Medieval philosophy in the West.
From St. Maximus’ Two Hundred Chapters on Theology:
Each substance including its own definition in itself, is a first principle by nature productive of the movement discerned in potentiality in it. Each natural motion toward actuality, conceptualized as after substance, yet prior to actuality, is an intermediate state, since in nature it divides both as that which mediates between them. And each actuality, in nature circumscribed by the corresponding logos, is the end of the substantializing movement conceptually prior to it. (1.3)
The first of only several times where St. John of Damascus writes about act and potency in The Fount of Knowledge is chapter 58 of Philosophical Chapters
The act of the one had and of the one having, as that of the arms and the armed or that of the wearer and the worn, is called a habit. In the second place, habits are adventitious acts which are stable, whether physical or spiritual. Such would be physical, as heat in heated things, or spiritual, as knowledge. Thirdly, habit is that which one does not yet have, but for having which one does have a suitability. And this is the first meaning of being in potency. Fourthly, there is the natural quality or habit, as the heat of the fire and the dream of the sleeper. And this is the second meaning of being in potency and the first meaning of being in act, for the fire can burn but actually does not. Fifthly, habit is the perfect act, as with the sight which is now seeing and the heat which is now heating.
Now I have not exhausted my reading of either of these two fathers of the Church, so I may be missing something. For the purposes of this post, I wanted to show my Orthodox readers that these concepts are found within Orthodoxy as well, needless to say, they evolved within the Latin West.
For Thomas Aquinas essence is related to existence as potency is to act. In patristic theology ousia is often translated to mean substance or essence (e.g. look at translations of the Creed, some say “of one essence”, and some say “consubstantial with the Father”), and in some cases it can be translated to mean nature (albeit typically physis is translated to nature), whereas in Aquinas’ system, substance and essence take on different meanings. Essence is best understood as potential and existence as actuality, and substance retains its definition as seen in Aristotle and the Damascene meaning something that exists in itself rather in another. The soul is the form of the material body, together they form a composite. St. John teaches that “the soul is a living substance, simple and incorporeal, of its own nature invisible to bodily eyes, activating an organic body…”(Orthodox Faith, book 2 ch 12). Aquinas states that, “The body is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul by the nature of its essence can be united to the body…” (Summa, question 75, seventh article). In both traditions, the soul is believed to animate and provide life to the body. In St. Maximus’ writings the logoi are the inner essences, the principles that provide the “blueprint” (for lack of a better word) which not only actualize the potential substance but also are the telos, the universal with which all particulars move towards. In Aquinas we see that idea of the soul acting as the substantial form to matter itself. It is a subtle difference that allows for the conditions to change enough for Descartes.
For all the differences between East and West, terms such as act and potency are used by both, and basic terms are translatable, e.g., substantia is synonymous with ousia. The concepts arising from language differences and further doctrinal development in the West, eventually led East and West to different anthropologies. Hylomorphism as understood in Scholasticism created the conditions for Cartesian dualism, which we will get to momentarily, but first we need to delineate Descartes’ method.
Enter Descartes
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) saw a problem, the world was enthralled by religious wars. His response was to try to find an absolute point of certainty, an irrefutable, starting point, with which all men can agree. So, he goes into isolation and follows a method based on reason. As he writes in his Discourse on Method, “Good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men.” Ergo, reason, as learned from his scholastic training, is reliable in the search for truth.
The four rules from Discourse on Method are as follows:
- Accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so.
- Divide up difficulties which I examined into as many parts as possible
- Carry on my reflections in due order from simplest to most complex
- Enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I should be certain at having omitted nothing
In his self-inflicted immurement, Descartes steps onto the path of doubt. He doubts all things until he can arrive at a point of certainty, this process was known as the certainty principle. I will provide Descartes’ own words because many have not read them for themselves, excerpts taken from Discourse on Method:
But no sooner had I embarked on this project than I noticed that while I was trying in this way to think everything to be false it had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing that this truth ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ was so firm and sure that not even the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics could shake it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of
the philosophy I was seeking.
He continues:
Then I looked carefully into what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I still couldn’t pretend that I didn’t exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought about doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely stopped thinking altogether, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed. This taught me that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think , and which doesn’t need any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this me—this soul that makes me what I am—is entirely distinct from the body, is easier to know than the body, and would still be just what it is even if the body didn’t exist
He reiterates these ideas in Meditations, excerpt taken from Sixth Meditation:
Given the mere fact that I know I exist and that, at the moment, I look upon my nature or essence as absolutely nothing other than that I am a thinking thing, I reasonably conclude that my essence consists of this single fact: I am a thinking thing. And although I may well possess (or rather, as I will state later, although I certainly do possess) a body which is very closely joined to me, nonetheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, insofar as I am merely a thinking thing, without extension, and, on the other hand, [I have] a distinct idea of body, insofar as it is merely an extended thing which does not think, it is certain that my mind is completely distinct from my body and can exist without it.
Further into this meditation, Descartes adds:
For it seems to me that it is mind alone, and not mind and body in conjunction, that is requisite to a knowledge of the truth to such things.
Descartes introduced the radical idea that mind and body are distinct substances, this became known as Cartesian dualism. Subsequent philosophers attempted to rectify this wedge between mind and body (or soul and body). How did these two substances co-exist? How did they relate to one another? Descartes himself, contrary to patristic teaching of the heart being the seat of the soul, opined that the soul resided in the pineal gland. Leibniz offered the most famous attempt at solving the mind-body problem by postulating a pre-established harmony, basically the two substances were synced up by God, ergo they existed in parallel. Descartes’ anthropology echoed Nestorianism, despite his claim that both substances were intermingled to the point of a unified whole.
Incompatibility with Orthodoxy
Descartes inherited the Scholastic emphasis on reason and the subtle distinction between essence and substance, along with the ideas of the formative soul and prime matter. It wasn’t a huge leap for Descartes to theorize that mind and body are distinct substances. There a two serious problems with Descartes’ philosophy in relation to Orthodoxy. The first problem is the role that the “I” as thinking substance, or mind, understood as the essence of a person and the sole standard for truth.
The Church teaches that the human person is a pyshco-somatic unity, created in the image and likeness of God. Not two distinct substances living in parallel. As previously mentioned, Cartesian Dualism is similar to Nestorianism applied to anthropology. Descartes’ idea that he was not his body, the thinking faculty is the real person, is the seed that eventually grows to the point where we are now in our postmodern society that believes what really matters is what a person thinks or feels him or herself to be, not biology.
Furthermore, the human person is not an atomic individual living divorced from a culturally embodied tradition of knowledge. It is impossible to start tabula rasa. We are not an authoritative, disembodied “I” observing the world and ruling on what is true or not, and, moreover, that this is the indubious, foundational point of all knowledge.
Although Lesslie Newbigin is not Orthodox he offers a pointed criticism:
[E]ven if we should grant that the statement “I think, therefore I am” is proof against doubt, it is so only because it makes no contact with any reality outside the thinking self — outside Descartes’s famous stove in which this great thought came to him.”
Newbigin goes on to say at another point that Descartes could never find a new and irrefutable starting point because he wrote in Latin, which he did not invent. He used a language that developed over centuries, and he was educated in the Scholastic system. Sometimes he appears very close to that school of thought, he just slightly altered metaphysics and epistemology, which put civilization on a crash course with modernity. Why? Because those who followed in his stead continued to further the Enlightenment project, and with other socio-culture changes altered the conditions of belief. As Charles Taylor describes in his tome A Secular Age, that Cartesian dualism and its variations would never have been conceivable in a pre-Renaissance context, first the world had to go through a period of disenchantment. The “porous self” had to become the “buffered self” before the idea of mind-body distinction could take root.
For Guenon Descartes represents a further degradation of thought. He points out that rationalism is connected with individualism, and excludes a higher supra-rational knowledge that is only found in traditional religion. In this introduction to Descartes, we didn’t even discuss his conception of God or his understanding of religious belief, which is simply summed up in Lossky’s criticism “that the God of Descartes is a mathematician’s God.”
In conclusion, the dawning of the modern age began with Descartes, and the Enlightenment project further propagated his ideas or, at least, addressed the issues with his philosophy and arriving at ideas even further afield from Orthodoxy. We as Orthodox Christians must be circumspect of modernity’s influence on our Tradition–after all, we are all of us born into a culture thoroughly shaped by modernity–lest we allow the gradual dying of the light.
From here we will likely move onto Kant.
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