The Contraction of Reason

Benedict XVI and the critique of modern ‘reason’

In his widely discussed Regensburg Lecture, Pope Benedict XVI drew attention to the radically modern project of what he called the “de-Hellenisation” of Christianity, outlining three main stages. The first stage commenced with the Reformation in the sixteenth century, in an attempt to return to scripture without the philosophical and metaphysical accretions from which figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin believed it needed to be liberated . The second stage, sparked by nineteenth century liberal Protestantism, made the distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – that is, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith – privileging mechanics and mathematical certainty above all other forms of knowledge . The third stage, in which we now find ourselves, takes the de-Hellenisation of Christianity as a given . It argues that the Gospel and practice of religion must be newly enculturated independent of the history of Christianity and according to one’s own particular history and worldview .

Highly critical of this false project (which he says is ultimately doomed to failure), Benedict pushes back:

The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed… the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself

Continuing, he concludes:

This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age . The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover,… [is] the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit . The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application . While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them . 7

As he sees it, the critique of modern reason has nothing to do with throwing out all that modern, scientific progress has achieved, nor attempting to construct an ahistorical mode of thinking that cuts off the gradual understanding of the unfolding of history and man’s place in it . What is needed is a way of confronting and overcoming the current climate into which modern man has been cast . This situation has been caused on the one hand by the contraction of reason, and on the other by the philosophical presuppositions that undergird modern philosophy and are diffused, as it were, into the very air . Stanley Grenz points out this very thing: “Postmodern thinkers have given up the search for universal, ultimate truth because they are convinced that there is nothing more to find than a host of conflicting interpretations or an infinity of linguistically created worlds.”8

Benedict goes right to the source by singling out John Duns Scotus, a fourteenth century Franciscan scholar, as the tipping point in late medieval thought that would break from the intellectualism of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas and would sunder the Divine Will from the Divine Wisdom, producing the plague of voluntarism and nominalism which continues even to this day . With this voluntarism we are left only with concepts, words and names; the intellect is left to itself, pumping out concepts of which the will makes use and then forces on outer phenomena as a manifestation of power . This is clearly opposed to the intellectualism of Augustine and Aquinas, in which external words are analogically related to inner words . For the intellectualist tradition, the five senses of the human body truly relate data to the mind, the agent intellect then illuminates the phantasms which are presented to it, intelligibility is abstracted therefrom, and, in turn, concepts are formed . In the intellectualist mode of thought, therefore, understanding precedes and generates concepts, which are then used to assist in our understanding of further intelligible reality . In the voluntarist mode of thought, however, concepts precede understanding, and the outer world is conformed to our ideas . Taken to its unavoidable conclusion, voluntarism terminates in the view that statements about the world can only ever truly describe the speaker’s own beliefs, not reality itself . There is an unbridgeable gap between the mind and reality, and also, by extension, between individual human minds, which become fundamentally mutually unintelligible . In other words, we need the work of thinkers like St Augustine and St Thomas to defend the reality that human beings can genuinely know true things about themselves and the world around them .

This contrast is clearly seen in the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant, one of the most prominent philosophers of the last three hundred years, who would deny to man the capacity of truly encountering reality in all its fullness . In one of his most well-known works, the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant states that “the understanding can never accomplish a priori [i .e . at the very beginning] anything more than to anticipate the form of a possible experience in general, and, since that which is not appearance cannot be an object of experience, it can never overstep the limits of sensibility, within which alone objects are given to us” . 9 Kant here makes the distinction between that which is presented to the mind as “appearance” and that which lies behind that appearance: in other words, Kant wants to claim that there is a realm which lies behind the sense impression that is not presented as an object of experience . It is in this sense that Kant distinguishes between “beings of sense (phaenomena)” and “beings of understanding (noumena)” . 10 Since for Kant it is only the phaenomena which are the proper objects of understanding, the things in themselves are always out of man’s reach, lying outside the scope of his ability to truly know them .

Thus, Kant can quite bluntly assert that “objects in themselves are not known to us at all . ”11 It is not that there is no existence outside our sense experience, but that “we have no insight into the possibility of such noumena, and the domain outside of the sphere of appearances is empty (for us) . ”12 It is the subjective aspect of the phaenomena which is most at play here: we are only able to come in contact with the phaenomena of subjective experience, and the objective world of the noumena is a realm apart from us to which we have no access .

As Bernard Lonergan points out, however, Kant’s critique of pure reason was not a critique of reason as classically conceived, “but of the human mind as conceived by Scotus,” who denied insight into phantasms (and therefore the power of the intellect to know things in themselves) . 13 Lonergan’s insight here is crucial, as he is able to clearly lay out the consequences which such a position entails: “The Scotist rejection of insight into phantasm necessarily reduced the act of understanding to seeing a nexus between concepts…”14 Also helpful is his discussion and summary of the differences between materialism, idealism and realism, which, due to its remarkable clarity, is worth quoting at length:

A useful preliminary [in coming to understand how the intellect comes to know things] is to note that animals know, not mere phenomena, but things: dogs know their masters, bones, other dogs, and not merely the appearances of these things . Now this sensitive integration of sensible data also exists in the human animal and even in the human philosopher .