Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments

Chapter 1: How Rational Is the Heart? How Natural Is Reason? How Universal Is Faith?

1 How Rational Is the Heart? How Natural Is Reason? How Universal Is Faith?  .  Instead of being a fable, truth bothers us as the most desired condition of an authentic life.It must be sought,however.Consequently, human existence has been experienced, represented, imagined, told, and dramatized as a journey, an exodus, a quest, a pilgrimage, an expedition , a ladder, a climb, an ascent. To discover the truth that really, ultimately, and primarily matters, Bonaventura sketches a travel guide in six stages, for each of which we are equipped with an appropriate mode of climbing: the senses, imagination ,reason,intellect,intelligence,and,finally,the very tip of the mind (apex mentis).1 Together, in a cooperation of all, these modes of awareness and experience are driven by desire—a burning desire that inflames the human heart because the truth can be approached but not caught—a desire for “the Sought” that, all along the journey, remains more sought than found. To be successful in this “cordial ascent,” as Bonaventura calls it, one must be full of a desire that is fueled by “outcries of the heart” and refulgent speculation. Only thus will a human mind be turned directly and intensely toward the light of truth.2 Bonaventura’s methodical desire is not less intense than Plato’s eros, Nietzsche’s pathos, or the radical urge of St. John of the Cross. But what 17 a contrast with the standard methods and methodologies of modern reason and experience! However, even the greatest thinkers of modernity were driven by a radical faith that can be compared to that of Nietzsche , John of the Cross, Bonaventura, and Plato. Once we are conquered by the conviction that the framework and the procedures of modern philosophy have lost their power, it would be ideal to invent an alternative method as rich and diversified as, for example, Bonaventura’s,3 but we know that no realistic methodology can be written before much experimentation has been accomplished in the half-dark, half-luminous trial and error of postmodern (i.e., postHegelian ) history. In this essay, I will neither try to prematurely sketch an updated travel guide for philosophy, nor stage the birth of a brand-new kind of thinking. I prefer to remind you and myself of some lost or forgotten possibilities of Western thought that risk being destroyed altogether if we deem ourselves capable of beginning anew without relying on any memory. I will (1) briefly summarize a critique of the framework within which a modern philosopher is supposed to think,(2) ask the question of how we can remedy some of this framework’s most blatant deficiencies, and (3) indicate a few desiderata with regard to a renaissance of thinking in a more radical and less restricted style than the one that during the last five centuries has been unfolded in remarkable but deficient ways. While proposing my remarks to your critical attention, I am not overly concerned about neat distinctions between philosophy and theology . Moreover, I beg your pardon for the oversimplified, perhaps even caricatured, aspects of some sweeping statements, which I cannot avoid altogether.4 THE MODERN UNIVERSE Since nothing new comes to life unless it is born from a pregnant past, while breaking away from that past’s exhausted possibilities, modern philosophy was not quite as different from premodern epochs of thought as it wanted and thought itself to be. Gilson, Courtine, Marion, and others have sufficiently demonstrated how much, for example, Des18 Adriaan T. Peperzak cartes owes to the scholastic tradition, and the same is even easier to prove for Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. Even the very attempt to “begin anew”is a well-known feature of the various rebirths that punctuate Western thinking since Parmenides. Descartes however, followed by many modern and postmodern philosophers, did not explicitly return to Greece or Rome, as most renaissances before and a few after him have done. He was too much impressed by the new possibilities revealed by modern mathematics and the mechanisms of early modern physics, and his philosophical successors remained fascinated by the transparent simplicity of the natural sciences. Past philosophy could be ignored.With regard to the scholastic past, a new foundation had to be laid, one that allowed for systematic constructions according to new principles of attention, perception, selection , observation, experimentation, measuring and calculation, logic, and argumentation. Let me quickly mention a few characteristics of the new project and its way to wisdom:5 1. Philosophy is...