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45  Chapter 2 God and the Logos of Scientific Calculation (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pascal) That You are, O Lord, my God, I must think though I did not believe. —Anselm, from the Proslogium (Alloquium Dei) Ergo est Deus. Q. E. D. —Jacob Wilhelm Schwartz, “Demonstratio Dei contra Spinosam” Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only. —Pascal, Pensées From this it is now wonderfully clear how in the very origination of things a certain Divine mathematics or metaphysical mechanics is employed, and how a determination of the maximum holds good. —Leibniz, “On the Ultimate Origination of Things” Luther, as we know, had his way. He insisted on promoting his “vital and eternal verity” and thereby brought about what he was prepared to endure: “even though the whole world should not only be thrown into turmoil and fighting, but shattered in chaos and reduced to nothing” (Discourse on the Will, 108). A century of religious war and bloodshed ensued. But not only the Thirty Years’ War between Protestants and Catholics created the sense of chaos. The fragmenting within Protestantism and the generation of competing sects also brought about a profound sense of doctrinal confusion and conflict. The influential Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, for example, wrote a letter of May 13, 1686, to the Prince of Hessen-Rheinfels that captures the course of the post-Reformation, in this case the variety of disputes within Protestantism itself on the question of the free will: This Lutheran minister of whom Your Highness speaks must have good qualities, but it is something incomprehensible and marking an 46 DIALOGUES BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON extremely blind prejudice that he can regard Luther as a man destined by God for the Reformation of the Christian religion. He must have a very low idea of true piety to find it in a man like him, imprudent in his speech and so gluttonous in his manner of living. I am not surprised at what this minister has said to you against those who are called Jansenists,since Luther at first put forward extreme propositions against the co-operation of grace and against the freedom of will so far as to give to one of his books the title De servo arbitrio, Necessitated Will. Melanchthon,some time after,mitigated these propositions a great deal and since then the Lutherans have gone over to the opposite extreme so that the Arminians have nothing stronger to oppose to the Gummarists than the doctrines of the Lutheran Church. There is no cause then for astonishment that the Lutherans of to-day, who occupy the same positions as the Arminians,are opposed to the disciples of Saint Augustine. For the Arminians are more sincere than are the Jesuits. They grant that Saint Augustine is opposed to them in the opinions which they have in common with the Jesuits but they do not think themselves obliged to follow him.1 Given these conflicting positions, no wonder people wanted a rational solution that would bring these often bloody arguments to rest on first principles . Where could they turn? In fact, not all was chaos. In the midst of perhaps the greatest unleashing of violent disruption that the European social order had ever seen, scientists were working out the systematic and natural laws that brought a clockwork regularity into the universe. For many,this scientific rationality offered a safe harbor from the ravages of religion. Indeed, it invited claims or charges of “atheism,”as thinkers from many schools—Aristotelian,Stoic,Epicurean,or Spinozist—allowed the concept of an orderly “Nature”to take over the role once played by God.2 But it became also a new source for a different kind 1. From Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 101. Arnauld (1560–1619) is in many ways a linchpin connecting most of the figures dealt with in this chapter, Descartes,Pascal,and Leibniz. Pascal wrote his eighteen letters published as Les provinciales (1656–57) in defense of Arnauld and the Jansenists (who challenged the Jesuits and the Catholic Church on precisely the issue of the free will, taking up St. Augustine’s position against the Pelagians). His Port-Royal Grammar (1660) and Port-Royal Logic (1662) were both based on Descartes’ Regulae and showed influences by Pascal (whose method Arnauld introduced). Early in his life he conducted a voluminous correspondence with Leibniz. 2. See Hans-Martin Barth’s excellent monograph for a different approach to the theological debates of the seventeenth century,namely,the charges and claims of “atheism...

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