Excellent article we so need. I feel that Thomas if he came to life now, would be sad that we have treated his work as a frozen relic.
Thomas voracious read and engaged with the frontiers of knowledge and philosophy. Like you said, he engaged with everyone, keeping what was good and going beyond where he needed to - see active indifference in response to Avicenna, and his subsistent relations which is almost oxymoronic in Aristotelian terms.
We need to retrieve Thomism the activity, and not just Thomism the fixed system.
Yes, exactly. The activity, not just the system. Lots to like about the system too, philosophy needs to be an ongoing effort, not just a preservation project.
So I generally love this, but this is where I suddenly and sharply descend:
"Dogma has a bad name in modern times; we tend to see it as the enemy of reason. And indeed, dogma does potentially demand a kind of blind obedience."
No, it doesn't, and such blind obedience could not be given by an honest man. But it's not necessary, because the evidence for Christianity is sufficient. No blind obedience needed.
And this is the importance of C.S Lewis. He never makes the "blind obedience" move. Occasionally he specifically condemns it. He defends Christianity in Cartesian fashion, from first principles and perceptions.
I do the same thing in my book *The Grand Coherence,* but I'm not blazing a trail, just updating Lewis.
Lewis has a high confidence in human reason, but doesn’t think it can reach certain defining Christian truths such as the Incarnation and the Trinity. His recommended path to faith allows reason to clear the way in a sense, to the point where Christian truth seems highly probable, the best available option.
I’m happy with that suggestion; if it’s worked for you, great. And yet it’s clearly possible for a person to reach a point where he believes that his natural reason has suggested that core teachings of Christian dogma are actually false. In that case, I believe the right course is to say, “my natural reason must have erred. I worked this sum wrong. I’ll go back and rework it.” (Alternatively, just let it go. But it’s fine to rework it! Which is a crucial point I do not believe in blind faith if that implies that there’s ever a point where we are *supposed to* switch our rational faculties off, as it were. That’s crossing the border into fundamentalism.)
I think that stance (if my reason says this, it must be in error), could be viewed as a form of blind obedience. Anyway that’s what I had in mind.
I think Lewis thought that you can't deduce the Trinity from pure reason. But you can accept the Trinity on the testimony of others, as we accept many other things. The Incarnation certainly is believed on evidence; eyewitness testimony says that this man said and did such things, and it follows from that that He must be God. You couldn't have concluded precisely that that is what must happen, if you hadn't been told. But normal evidence leads you there.
I think Lewis could be quoted disagreeing with you on the case where natural reason leads you to a conclusion contrary to the faith. I think he says explicitly that leaving the Church is the first religious thing that some people do, because it's motivated by intellectual honesty, whereas their practice of Christianity had been mere conformism. I wouldn't recommend to someone to leave Christianity because of honest doubts; I would seek to argue them out of those doubts. But I wouldn't condemn someone who did leave Christianity for that reason.
The intellect is not the only faculty God gave us with some capacity to grasp the truth. One has to *tell* the truth but the process by which one reaches it could be more intellectual for some and less for others.
I also think your account (I’m not quite sure where Lewis falls) underestimates the level of mystery in Christian faith, the extent to which some parts are deeply mysterious, truly beyond our ken. I think some parts of the faith are best understood as fruitful mysteries; we can’t really understand them but we can see “what they do,” how they’ve held Christian faith together. Maybe that amounts to a kind of inductive or probability-based argument for belief. Maybe? But I don’t think one has to take that route to have a properly grounded faith.
I very much believe that human beings should use their God-given reason, and should never agree to *turn off* their reason because they’re displeased by what it yielded. But I also believe that faith is a gift of grace, and that some mysteries of Christianity are mostly impenetrable to human reason, at least here below.
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity exemplifies the method. It's popularized and abbreviated, so it's not as rigorous as it might have been in a philosophical magnum opus, but he starts from something everyone agrees on-- the existence of morality, which we all show that we believe in when we quarrel, regardless of what intellectual view of it we may take-- and then derives the existence of God (because a law needs a lawgiver) and the falsity of materialism from that, and goes from there.
He does not say, “These are the dogmas, you must accept them.” He starts from something people already know, and then reasons from there. No doubt the argument could be critiqued and would need refinement and reinforcement. And much of the reinforcements it needs is supplied elsewhere in Lewis's writing. But the peculiar intellectual honesty that pervades Lewis's work is tied inextricably to his refusal to invoke intellectual authority to impose dogma. He lives up to the philosophical mandate of Socrates and Descartes, that everything must be open to doubt, not by him exactly, except for purposes of argument, since he has already thought it through and reached his conclusions, but for his readers.
I think that's a key virtue you'll need if you want to succeed at this. Yes, people have lots of data but are starved for truth. But they also know that history is full of the evils that have resulted from people taking things on blind faith. That is forbidden. You must take the path of Lewis and let God be in the dock.
So there are some interesting epistemic questions here, on which I am fairly sure that there would be some space between you and me, probably between Lewis and me, and possibly also between you and Lewis though I’m not quite sure. I am not of course suggesting one should begin the process of evangelization with “these are dogmas and you must accept them”; the natural process of human reasoning needs to be respected far more than that; nevertheless I don’t natural reason alone can secure as much as you seem to think. Yes, there’s an act of intellectual submission along the way. It doesn’t have to be “blind” in the sense that the use of reason is never as such discouraged, but sometimes it can be a little blind in the sense of “knowingly going beyond what reason can secure.” To an extent I think this is necessarily so! We need to submit all things to God, including the intellect; it’s admittedly quite hard sometimes to figure out when and how to submit that *to God* as opposed to a human authority, popular opinion etc but it’s part of the process.
But there’s some lower-hanging fruit here too which is that I think it’s perfectly obvious that most people don’t go through anything that similar to Lewis’ intellectual path on their way to faith. If “thinking about it” in that way is necessary to justify faith, most believers’ faith is probably irresponsible and “blind” in the bad sense. So is that really the case? I don’t think so.
As I said above, I don’t think the intellect is the only faculty God gave us for leading us closer to the truth. The fact that tradition holds that God is Truth, Beauty, and Love, and that all these are actually one thing in some mysterious way we don’t fully understand, is for me an inspiring subject for reflection; I think everyone should have some appreciation of all of these but it seems clear to me that most people are more attuned to this one and others to that one. People for instance who are very attuned to liturgical beauty and seem to have a deep (and even maybe mystical?) experience of God in liturgy or prayer but hardly seem worried about theology at all. People who give themselves in loving service and have a deep sense of building up the Body of Christ, caring for the needs of others, but also seem… not very attuned to theological questions. Their faith clearly isn’t intellectually grounded in anything like the way you’re describing. Is it “blind” or irresponsible? I can’t say for sure of course but I certainly wouldn’t go out on that particular limb! I remember hearing a priest explain once that “we love to make arguments for the faith but no one comes to the faith for intellectual reasons, it’s for the loving interaction they see or experience among people etc” and I laughed some to myself because he was definitely wrong about that: People do come to the faith by intellectual pathways! But not everyone. Probably not the majority of people. I’d say there’s surely *some* intellectual component for most people but it’s not necessarily that dispositive. And I’m not willing to say that that’s a problem; I think that the truth is complex and can be grasped in many ways, that that God’s ways are frequently beyond my ken.
Re: this project. Certainly here, we’re going to work mainly in the realm of natural reason. I already said I might relax that a little on weekends to do some Sunday faith reflections, but of course I wasn’t planning to hurl anathemas at people, only to reflect a little on the life of faith from “an insider perspective” as it were. I have no authority over anyone! (Except, okay, a little bit my own kids, but even that is sort of provisional and temporary.) It can be an advantage in contexts like this. Here we can just talk; I’m not responsible for *making* anyone believe anything.
But that doesn’t mean that nobody is. In this thread we’re discussing a theological question: How is faith supposed to work? You seem to think it can *almost* entirely devolve to reason, and I don’t think that’s right.
And sorry, I don't want to be a downer! But I was very inspired by your vision of a rebirth of Christian philosophy. But modern educated people assume that philosophy is the opposite of intellectual submission, so I feel like that defense of dogma is going to nip your project in the bud. The crucial point that needs to be made if we want to revive Christian philosophy is that you *don't* need to make that move of intellectual submission. Lewis showed how to be intellectually honest and a Christian at the same time. That's the project that I would love to see thrive and expand.
So the statement that we must submit the intellects to God is a bit like saying that a soldier must always subordinate his will to The will of his commander, including his commander's will about how his orders should be interpreted. The advice doesn't make sense, because the soldier's knowledge of his commander's will must be filtered through his own good faith attempt to interpret the orders. And if a commander gives an order about how to interpret his orders, the soldiers still has to interpret that command. It's an infinite regress of futile submission which can't ever overcome the autonomy that is part of the soldier's nature.
To submit one's intellect to God is meaningful in that one should try to allocate one's intellectual labors in a way that will please God. And of course, it's often reasonable to trust intellectual authority of different kinds, as against one's own spontaneous judgment. The mistake is to think there's some kind of special submission that the intellect to God like the submission of the will. That falls down logically. It's the will, not the intellect, that Christians must surrender in an act of radical submission.
One has to tell the truth. The right reason to become a Christian is that, having thought about it, one has come to the conclusion that Christianity is true.
There can be a high degree of convergent certainty at these things. How likely is it that the law of gravity is not true, or the 2 + 2 does not equal 4? Just because a belief has a rational basis does not mean that it is fragile or tenuous.
Now, there is a different but related question of how to refute the skeptic. In a certain sense, faith is a necessity not so much for Christianity as for science and common sense. Just because the sun has risen 10,000 times does not logically entail that it will rise tomorrow.
But there need be no particular epistemic discontinuity about believing in Christianity relative to all sorts of everyday beliefs.
Excellent article we so need. I feel that Thomas if he came to life now, would be sad that we have treated his work as a frozen relic.
Thomas voracious read and engaged with the frontiers of knowledge and philosophy. Like you said, he engaged with everyone, keeping what was good and going beyond where he needed to - see active indifference in response to Avicenna, and his subsistent relations which is almost oxymoronic in Aristotelian terms.
We need to retrieve Thomism the activity, and not just Thomism the fixed system.
Yes, exactly. The activity, not just the system. Lots to like about the system too, philosophy needs to be an ongoing effort, not just a preservation project.
So I generally love this, but this is where I suddenly and sharply descend:
"Dogma has a bad name in modern times; we tend to see it as the enemy of reason. And indeed, dogma does potentially demand a kind of blind obedience."
No, it doesn't, and such blind obedience could not be given by an honest man. But it's not necessary, because the evidence for Christianity is sufficient. No blind obedience needed.
And this is the importance of C.S Lewis. He never makes the "blind obedience" move. Occasionally he specifically condemns it. He defends Christianity in Cartesian fashion, from first principles and perceptions.
I do the same thing in my book *The Grand Coherence,* but I'm not blazing a trail, just updating Lewis.
So, you think a person should reject a core principle of dogma if his best rational analysis leads him to the conclusion that it’s wrong?
Lewis has a high confidence in human reason, but doesn’t think it can reach certain defining Christian truths such as the Incarnation and the Trinity. His recommended path to faith allows reason to clear the way in a sense, to the point where Christian truth seems highly probable, the best available option.
I’m happy with that suggestion; if it’s worked for you, great. And yet it’s clearly possible for a person to reach a point where he believes that his natural reason has suggested that core teachings of Christian dogma are actually false. In that case, I believe the right course is to say, “my natural reason must have erred. I worked this sum wrong. I’ll go back and rework it.” (Alternatively, just let it go. But it’s fine to rework it! Which is a crucial point I do not believe in blind faith if that implies that there’s ever a point where we are *supposed to* switch our rational faculties off, as it were. That’s crossing the border into fundamentalism.)
I think that stance (if my reason says this, it must be in error), could be viewed as a form of blind obedience. Anyway that’s what I had in mind.
I think Lewis thought that you can't deduce the Trinity from pure reason. But you can accept the Trinity on the testimony of others, as we accept many other things. The Incarnation certainly is believed on evidence; eyewitness testimony says that this man said and did such things, and it follows from that that He must be God. You couldn't have concluded precisely that that is what must happen, if you hadn't been told. But normal evidence leads you there.
I think Lewis could be quoted disagreeing with you on the case where natural reason leads you to a conclusion contrary to the faith. I think he says explicitly that leaving the Church is the first religious thing that some people do, because it's motivated by intellectual honesty, whereas their practice of Christianity had been mere conformism. I wouldn't recommend to someone to leave Christianity because of honest doubts; I would seek to argue them out of those doubts. But I wouldn't condemn someone who did leave Christianity for that reason.
“Having thought about it…”
The intellect is not the only faculty God gave us with some capacity to grasp the truth. One has to *tell* the truth but the process by which one reaches it could be more intellectual for some and less for others.
I also think your account (I’m not quite sure where Lewis falls) underestimates the level of mystery in Christian faith, the extent to which some parts are deeply mysterious, truly beyond our ken. I think some parts of the faith are best understood as fruitful mysteries; we can’t really understand them but we can see “what they do,” how they’ve held Christian faith together. Maybe that amounts to a kind of inductive or probability-based argument for belief. Maybe? But I don’t think one has to take that route to have a properly grounded faith.
I very much believe that human beings should use their God-given reason, and should never agree to *turn off* their reason because they’re displeased by what it yielded. But I also believe that faith is a gift of grace, and that some mysteries of Christianity are mostly impenetrable to human reason, at least here below.
C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity exemplifies the method. It's popularized and abbreviated, so it's not as rigorous as it might have been in a philosophical magnum opus, but he starts from something everyone agrees on-- the existence of morality, which we all show that we believe in when we quarrel, regardless of what intellectual view of it we may take-- and then derives the existence of God (because a law needs a lawgiver) and the falsity of materialism from that, and goes from there.
He does not say, “These are the dogmas, you must accept them.” He starts from something people already know, and then reasons from there. No doubt the argument could be critiqued and would need refinement and reinforcement. And much of the reinforcements it needs is supplied elsewhere in Lewis's writing. But the peculiar intellectual honesty that pervades Lewis's work is tied inextricably to his refusal to invoke intellectual authority to impose dogma. He lives up to the philosophical mandate of Socrates and Descartes, that everything must be open to doubt, not by him exactly, except for purposes of argument, since he has already thought it through and reached his conclusions, but for his readers.
I think that's a key virtue you'll need if you want to succeed at this. Yes, people have lots of data but are starved for truth. But they also know that history is full of the evils that have resulted from people taking things on blind faith. That is forbidden. You must take the path of Lewis and let God be in the dock.
You *must*?
So there are some interesting epistemic questions here, on which I am fairly sure that there would be some space between you and me, probably between Lewis and me, and possibly also between you and Lewis though I’m not quite sure. I am not of course suggesting one should begin the process of evangelization with “these are dogmas and you must accept them”; the natural process of human reasoning needs to be respected far more than that; nevertheless I don’t natural reason alone can secure as much as you seem to think. Yes, there’s an act of intellectual submission along the way. It doesn’t have to be “blind” in the sense that the use of reason is never as such discouraged, but sometimes it can be a little blind in the sense of “knowingly going beyond what reason can secure.” To an extent I think this is necessarily so! We need to submit all things to God, including the intellect; it’s admittedly quite hard sometimes to figure out when and how to submit that *to God* as opposed to a human authority, popular opinion etc but it’s part of the process.
But there’s some lower-hanging fruit here too which is that I think it’s perfectly obvious that most people don’t go through anything that similar to Lewis’ intellectual path on their way to faith. If “thinking about it” in that way is necessary to justify faith, most believers’ faith is probably irresponsible and “blind” in the bad sense. So is that really the case? I don’t think so.
As I said above, I don’t think the intellect is the only faculty God gave us for leading us closer to the truth. The fact that tradition holds that God is Truth, Beauty, and Love, and that all these are actually one thing in some mysterious way we don’t fully understand, is for me an inspiring subject for reflection; I think everyone should have some appreciation of all of these but it seems clear to me that most people are more attuned to this one and others to that one. People for instance who are very attuned to liturgical beauty and seem to have a deep (and even maybe mystical?) experience of God in liturgy or prayer but hardly seem worried about theology at all. People who give themselves in loving service and have a deep sense of building up the Body of Christ, caring for the needs of others, but also seem… not very attuned to theological questions. Their faith clearly isn’t intellectually grounded in anything like the way you’re describing. Is it “blind” or irresponsible? I can’t say for sure of course but I certainly wouldn’t go out on that particular limb! I remember hearing a priest explain once that “we love to make arguments for the faith but no one comes to the faith for intellectual reasons, it’s for the loving interaction they see or experience among people etc” and I laughed some to myself because he was definitely wrong about that: People do come to the faith by intellectual pathways! But not everyone. Probably not the majority of people. I’d say there’s surely *some* intellectual component for most people but it’s not necessarily that dispositive. And I’m not willing to say that that’s a problem; I think that the truth is complex and can be grasped in many ways, that that God’s ways are frequently beyond my ken.
Re: this project. Certainly here, we’re going to work mainly in the realm of natural reason. I already said I might relax that a little on weekends to do some Sunday faith reflections, but of course I wasn’t planning to hurl anathemas at people, only to reflect a little on the life of faith from “an insider perspective” as it were. I have no authority over anyone! (Except, okay, a little bit my own kids, but even that is sort of provisional and temporary.) It can be an advantage in contexts like this. Here we can just talk; I’m not responsible for *making* anyone believe anything.
But that doesn’t mean that nobody is. In this thread we’re discussing a theological question: How is faith supposed to work? You seem to think it can *almost* entirely devolve to reason, and I don’t think that’s right.
And sorry, I don't want to be a downer! But I was very inspired by your vision of a rebirth of Christian philosophy. But modern educated people assume that philosophy is the opposite of intellectual submission, so I feel like that defense of dogma is going to nip your project in the bud. The crucial point that needs to be made if we want to revive Christian philosophy is that you *don't* need to make that move of intellectual submission. Lewis showed how to be intellectually honest and a Christian at the same time. That's the project that I would love to see thrive and expand.
So the statement that we must submit the intellects to God is a bit like saying that a soldier must always subordinate his will to The will of his commander, including his commander's will about how his orders should be interpreted. The advice doesn't make sense, because the soldier's knowledge of his commander's will must be filtered through his own good faith attempt to interpret the orders. And if a commander gives an order about how to interpret his orders, the soldiers still has to interpret that command. It's an infinite regress of futile submission which can't ever overcome the autonomy that is part of the soldier's nature.
To submit one's intellect to God is meaningful in that one should try to allocate one's intellectual labors in a way that will please God. And of course, it's often reasonable to trust intellectual authority of different kinds, as against one's own spontaneous judgment. The mistake is to think there's some kind of special submission that the intellect to God like the submission of the will. That falls down logically. It's the will, not the intellect, that Christians must surrender in an act of radical submission.
One has to tell the truth. The right reason to become a Christian is that, having thought about it, one has come to the conclusion that Christianity is true.
There can be a high degree of convergent certainty at these things. How likely is it that the law of gravity is not true, or the 2 + 2 does not equal 4? Just because a belief has a rational basis does not mean that it is fragile or tenuous.
Now, there is a different but related question of how to refute the skeptic. In a certain sense, faith is a necessity not so much for Christianity as for science and common sense. Just because the sun has risen 10,000 times does not logically entail that it will rise tomorrow.
But there need be no particular epistemic discontinuity about believing in Christianity relative to all sorts of everyday beliefs.