Augustinian-Cartesian Index: Texts and Commentary (review)

This is an English translation and substantial expansion (100 pages) of the French edition (Index Augustino-Cartésien: Textes et Commentaire [Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2000]). Besides augmenting Augustinian citations, Janowski has added indices and commentaries for Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, Francis Bacon, and Montaigne. The result is a crucial compilation and analysis of the major textual sources of Descartes's philosophy. Janowski demonstrates that Descartes's metaphysics is foundationally Augustinian, particularly in his dependence on the doctrine of God's creation of eternal truths: "the idea that God creates by an act of understanding" (136). This doctrine was, in fact, left out of the Meditations. Janowski argues that it logically belongs in the fourth Meditation but was deleted because it was almost universally denied by the Thomistically based philosophers of the day.

Here is the conservative list of Augustinian building blocks used by Descartes in developing his new philosophy:

1. The goal of philosophy: knowledge of God and the soul.
2. The distinction between science (scientia) and conviction (persvasio).
3. Mathematics is certain regardless of whether I am awake or asleep.
4. The evil genius.
5. The cogito.
6. The definition of the soul.
7. The notion of extension (extensio).
8. The example of a piece of wax.
9. Inspectio mentis.
10. I am something mid-way between being and non-being.
11. The explanation of the source of error.
12. In intellectual vision there is no error.
13. The intellect arbitrates among the data of the senses.
14. The soul is not like a pilot on a ship.
15. The "voluntarist" definition of eternal truths.
16. God creates by the act of his understanding.
17. Inneism .

(152–53)

It is impossible to overstate the importance of Janowski's work both for comprehending Descartes's philosophy in historical context and for analyzing his arguments to determine the adequacy of such doctrines as mind-body dualism, which continues to be a primary belief about human beings by the world's populations and religions today despite its almost universal denial by Western scientists and philosophers of mind.

That Descartes was influenced by Augustine was apparent from the appearance of his first publication in 1637 of the Discourse on Method in which "I think therefore I am" is presented to defeat skepticism. Among others, Mersenne remarked on the cogito's appearance in Augustine, and later Arnauld noted it in his objections to the Meditations. To these comments and others in which Augustinian sources were brought to Descartes's attention, Descartes replied briefly in terms to imply that he had not read Augustine. Janowski shows that without question Descartes did—whether consciously or unconsciously—base his philosophy on Augustinian texts. But this is not to argue that Descartes does not truly develop a new Cartesian philosophy. Nobody builds on thin air, and Janowski shows the ground on which Descartes stood.

Why have scholarly giants from Etienne Gilson to Jean-Luc Marion not previously pulled all these Augustinian connections together to do—in what is certainly one of the major works in Cartesian scholarship of the last century—what Janowski has done? I don't think there is a definitive answer to this question. In Descartes's own day, there were both political and intellectual reasons why only a few people noticed it, and why fewer made anything of it. Politically, the Aristotelian-Thomistic Jesuits were pushing the Platonic-Augustinian Jansenists and Oratorians inexorably toward extinction. Intellectually, the relatively liberal views of the Thomistic Jesuits concerning the role of grace, good works, and redemption were opposed to the harsh Augustinian views that grace is not earned but is God's gift so no one can be assured of salvation. The God of the Jesuits who is approachable through the priesthood of the Church was contrasted to the unknown God of the Jansenists, epitomized by the terror of Pascal in the face of the infinite, incomprehensible Godhead. In blunter terms, whom...