Apologia Spring 2012

Spring 2012, Volume 6, Issue 2

featuring

Christianity and the Good Life:

The Early Church and its Contemporaries

also inside

A Response to the Problem of Evil Christianity and Meaningful Work Faith and Romanticism

A Letter from the Editor

A

s college students, we are skilled at managing cognitive dissonance. We learn about systems of morality in philosophy and religion classes, but in Econ 1 we are told to ignore the effects those systems can have on human behavior. We volunteer regularly, and some of us take to heart the call to “make the world’s troubles your own,” but scarce few seek to do such noble work after graduation. In the life of the modern student, there seems to be a disconnect between what one believes, what one learns, and what one does.

Our generation has grappled with these issues of cognitive dissonance for so long that it seems we’ve given up on the hope of finding a coherent worldview altogether. Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor points out that this is partly due to the uniqueness of our times.

At few other historical points has there been so much progress and so much destruction: as he writes, the past 100 years have been a time “of both Auschwitz and Hiroshima and of Amnesty International and Medecins sans Frontieres.” Events and advances in knowledge have so undermined the old ways of thinking that, rather than seeing our selves and our lives as a coherent whole, we now wear different hats on different occasions: Religious on Sundays, Poets on Mondays, Scientists on Thursdays, Epicureans on Fridays.

What is distinctive about the Christian tradition is that it challenges us to have a more coherent worldview. The faith has always sought an integration of belief, knowledge, and action. To see what it means for one’s metaphysics to profoundly affect one’s daily living, see the monks and nuns of the contemplative orders of the Catholic Church. To see the connection between faith and works, see the Christian missionaries providing health care and critical services around the world. And to see the connection between knowledge and belief, see the writings of Christian scientists who see in their work not a threat to their preconceptions of creation, but the hand of a God who works in mysterious ways.

In today’s age, a coherent worldview is hard to come by. It is one of Christianity’s great strengths that it attempts, and provides, just such a view—not by ignoring details, and not by hiding from facts that are inconvenient. Rather, as Taylor writes, it welcomes all the facts of this world while recognizing that there is a point to our existence that is not exhausted by life. In this issue, you will encounter attempts by a variety of Christians to dig deeper into this unique way of life. Some are popes, some are saints, and some are college students.

But the work they do in seeking Christ in areas like work, art, happiness, and science shows that, contrary to what we might sometimes think, there is at least one possibility for living life in a fully integrated way.

Brendan Woods Editor-in-Chief

Submissions

We welcome the submission of any article, essay, or artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia.

Submissions should seek to promote respectful, thoughtful discussion in the community. We will consider submissions from any member of the community but reserve the right to publish only those that align with our mission statement and quality rubric. Email: The.Dartmouth.Apologia@dartmouth.edu

Front cover image

by Kelsey Carter ‘12

Letters to the Editor

We value your opinions and encourage thoughtful submissions expressing support, dissent, or other views.

We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community.

Spring 2012, Volume 6, Issue 2

Editor-in-Chief Brendan Woods ‘13 Managing Editor Emily DeBaun ‘12 Editorial Board Peter Blair ‘12 Lee Farnsworth ‘12 Business Manager Brady Kelly ‘12 Events Manager Suiwen Liang ‘13 Production Edward Talmage ‘12 Do-Hee Kim ‘12 Elli Kim ‘13 Jessica Yu ‘14 Minae Seog ‘14 Michael Choi ‘14 Photography Kelsey Carter ‘12 Clarissa Li ‘15 Contributors Peter Osorio ‘12 Shengzhi Li ‘12 Chris Hauser ‘14 Hannah Jung ‘15 Nathaniel Schmucker ‘15 Henry Waller ‘15 Elena Zinski ‘15 John Hare Faculty Advisory Board Gregg Fairbrothers, Tuck Richard Denton, Physics Eric Hansen, Thayer Eric Johnson, Tuck James Murphy, Government Leo Zacharski, DMS Special thanks to Council on Student Organizations The Eleazar Wheelock Society

Apologia Online

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The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2012 The Dartmouth Apologia.

Suiwen Liang ‘13

CHRISTIANITY AND 8 MEANINGFUL WORK Shengzhi Li ‘12

REFLECTIONS ON THE 14 NATURE OF FAITH Henry Waller ‘14

NEOSTOICISM AND THEODICY: 19 Justus Lipsius on the Problem of Evil Peter Osorio ‘12

CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH AND 24 A CHRISTIAN UNDERSTANDING OF ROMANTICISM Nathaniel Schmucker ‘15

RECOVERING THE 28 METAPHYSICAL CHARACTER OF TRUTH: A Revival of Thomistic Epistemology Chris Hauser ‘14

THE MORAL GAP 34

John Hare, Yale University

BOOK REVIEWS:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s 37 Introduction to Christianity Elena Zinski ‘15 Timothy Keller’s 38 The Reason for God Hannah Jung ‘15

T

he Dartmouth Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.

TheDartmouth

Apologia

CHRISTIANS, PAGANS, 2 AND THE GOOD LIFE

A Journal of Christian Thought

the

Christians, Pagans, & Good Life C

hristianity is increasingly perceived as irrelevant to human flourishing and happiness.

For many, Christian happiness resembles a form of ascetic spirituality irretrievably detached from earthly bliss. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche inveighs, “The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer from life in whatever form he meets it. The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life.”i Likewise, Bertrand Russell accuses Christians of forfeiting this earthly life for the next in his The History of Western Philosophy, writing, “Christianity… in its early form, placed all good in the life beyond the grave.”ii Pitted against Christianity’s purported otherworldly yearning, classical paganism appears to many to embody sensuous vitality and terrestrial mirth. In this view, Dionysus stands as the paragon of good cheer and celebration in contrast to the portentous and apocalyptically-minded apostles. The youthful and joyous songs of nymphs were silenced to make way for the deadening monotony of church bells and hymns. Christianity’s triumph over its contemporary

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by Suiwen Liang

mythologies and philosophies plunged the Roman, and ultimately the Western, world into wan vapidity.

Nevertheless, a brief examination of the dominant religious and philosophical movements that were contemporary to early Christianity suggests that this romanticism toward Western culture’s pagan past is largely unfounded. The ethos of the Roman Empire in those days was, in fact, one of physical abnegation, terrestrial leave-taking, and spiritual disquietude. As G. K. Chesterton says, the pagan world was “darkened with incurable despair.”iii In contrast to the three most influential worldviews of the Roman world— Gnosticism, Stoicism, Neoplatonism—Christianity proclaimed that our earthly realm and needs were of tremendous importance to both our humanity and God. Thus, Christianity did not inaugurate an age of mourning but an era of celebration in a time of endemic spiritual decline.iv Of the empire’s innumerable religions and cults, none proved as widespread or as emblematic of the spiritual milieu as Gnosticism.v The Gnostics were a collection of enigmatic syncretists of Christianity and pagan thought, encompassing a vast range of disparate

Les Romains de la décadence

by Thomas Couture, 1847

beliefs but united in their belief in salvation through the gnosis—i.e., secret knowledge—and antipathy towards the material realm.vi To the Gnostic, matter was evil, and our earthly dwelling either “a disaster or a big misunderstanding.”vii In contrast, the spiritual realm of the Aeons ruled by the Divine Being was perfect.viii An inferior god called the Demiurge fashioned—out of, at best, ignorance or, at worst, malevolence—the flawed physical world in which human spirits, which are fragments of the divine, became imprisoned in bodily flesh.ix Regardless of the creator’s motives or competence, the Demiurge was universally reviled by the Gnostics as both enemy and jailer of mankind.

As divine spirits trapped in bodily prisons, Gnostics sought to return to the spiritual realm of the Divine Being. In their theology, Jesus, as messenger of the spiritual realm, entered the world to awaken the spirits to their true selves by imparting secret knowledge.

Only through this “self-discovery, self-awareness, selfactualization, and self-salvation”x gained from possession of the gnosis could the spirit be saved from its bodily shackles. Gnosticism proved attractive by offering the destitute and elite alike, in a time of great social and economic uncertainty, a deification of the self in which they, as “members of an elite of true spiritual origin, feel out of place in this world [because]... they have forgotten their true selves and become enmeshed in bodies.”xi As the Gnostic text Hymn of the Pearl asserts, all they required was a reminder of their true identity— and by extension, divine superiority to their neighborsxii—to be freed. While some Gnostics were less

hostile towards the material world and their neighbors than others, the “dark pessimism does predominate”xiii and where it fades, there persists a “spirit of nostalgia... a passionate longing for something far away and long ago,”xiv usually a mark of present misery.xv The material cosmos was only a transitory experiencexvi to the Gnostic who would find release from tedium after death.xvii Thus, the Gnostic loathed his earthly existence and yearned for spiritual escape.

Spiritual withdrawal from the world did not remain reserved to the religious. Spiritual ennui also permeated the philosophical schools of the intellectual elite. xviii Stoicism, a school that enjoyed popularity among the ranks of respected teachers and public officials, scorned earthly goods and held that happiness lay in virtue alone. Unlike the Gnostics, they held that everything that existed was material, even God, who, for them, was the immanent and impersonal Logos that ensouls the Cosmos.xix For the Stoics, all things sought self-preservation (okeiosis) or the fulfillment of one’s nature. Since man’s nature is fundamentally rational, his purpose was to heed the Logos or God by developing virtue.xx Not surprisingly, Stoics were respected as some of the most virtuous and selfless citizens of the empire, especially in contrast to their Epicurean rivals who shunned public life. Nevertheless, the Stoic life exacted a staggering cost: the renunciation of the passions. According to the Stoic philosophy, any kind of loss in this world, no matter how great, ought not trouble a person in the slightest. Since happiness was found in virtue alone, only that which affects the Stoic’s rational nature

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constituted good and evil. All external goods—family, friendship, food, health, wealth, disease, pain, death— were deemed “indifferents” (adiophora) and by extension, utterly irrelevant to happiness:xxi Indeed, if wisdom [i.e. virtue] and wealth were both desirable, the combination of both would be more desirable than wisdom alone; but that is not the case that, if both are deserving of approbation, the combination is worth more than wisdom alone on its own.

For we judge health deserving of a certain degree of approbation but do not place it among goods, and we consider that there is no degree of approbation so great that it can be preferred to virtue. This the Peripatetics do not hold, for they must say that an action which is both virtuous and without pain is more desirable than the same action accompanied by pain. We [Stoics] think otherwise.xxii Yet if all external goods were to be regarded as irrelevant to happiness, why is it that we cherish and fear them? The Stoic would answer that our emotions and desires are at fault and exist as no more than excessive impulses or faulty value judgments of the mind. xxiii,xxiv Emblematic of the Stoic way of life is the Sage, who has become fully attuned to the cosmic Logos.

The Sage achieves apatheia, a state of freedom from all emotional disturbances, and in doing so becomes wholly self-sufficient and detached from worldly interferences.xxv Hence, Epictetus, in the Enchiridion, declares, “If [something] concerns anything beyond our power, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.”xxvi Thus, the Stoic yearned to become imperturbable and indifferent to all earthly blessings.

Another popular philosophy in the early first century, Neoplatonism was “the last and the boldest attempt of the Hellenic mind to solve the riddle of the world and existence.”xxvii Like the Gnostics, they believed in a spiritual realm beyond the senses, for them the realm of Ideas consisting of threefold principle: the One, Mind, and Soul. At the center of their complex metaphysical infrastructure stands the unknowable and ineffable One from which all things emanate and derive their existence through contemplation.xxix The Intelligence (Nous), also identified as God or the Demiurge, immediately follows the One.xxx Unlike the Gnostics, the influential Neoplatonist Plotinus held the Demiurge with reverence rather than contempt, in fact scorning the Gnostics for their detestation of the divinity and its workmanship.xxxi Emanating from the Intelligence is the Soul, which is capable of actualizing its own thoughts through extension and thereby gave rise to our corporeal existence.

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According to the Neoplatonist theory, our souls were corrupted after ensouling matter, a bare substratum and the absence of being.xxxiii Again in contrast to the Gnostics, Plotinus praised and esteemed the physical world as the beautiful handiwork and reflection of the spiritual;xxxiv,xxxv nevertheless, Neoplatonism agreed with Gnosticism that matter was unmistakably evil.

Even Plotinus, despite his fondness for the physical world, was “driven to take refuge in Gnostic dualism and Gnostic hatred of things material,”xxxvi declaring that “matter remains a ‘corpse adorned’ (I.4.5.18), a corpse that has never known the breath of life (III.4.I.7).”xxxvii Thus, the Neoplatonists saw this world as a facade and shadow of the divine realm alloyed by its union with matter.

Salvation then for the Neoplatonists lay in unobstructed union with the One, a goal made difficult by our status as earthly creatures. The tragedy of our incarnation was the resultant struggle to contemplate true reality—that is, the world of Forms and the One. Unlike the Intelligence and the disembodied Soul, which can directly contemplate the One, the embodied soul mistakes the material world for its home and struggles to recall the highest level of reality.xxxviii Plotinus therefore urges his followers to flee from “this world’s ways and things”xxxix and turn to contemplation of the One through virtue and philosophical meditation. Sihler writes that the Neoplatonist held that “[t] he highest life of the soul is a kind of spiritual or metaphysical hermitage or withdrawal from this world, and so from men and action, in order to view the One.”xl Only then can we rediscover the One, at which point the Neoplatonist, like the Stoic Sage, achieves complete imperturbability and tranquility. In the words of Kenney, “This is ‘the end of the journey,’ to be alone with the alone.”xli In order to appreciate the radical nature of the Christian faith, one must examine it in relation to these pagan contemporaries. Contrary to modern conceptions, it was Christianity’s pagan counterparts that embraced otherworldliness, shunning the world and its blessings in their pursuit of the good life. True, at times certain Christian thinkers have held positions that resembled pagan beliefs; nevertheless, Christianity has never fully renounced the goodness of the material realm. Against the pagan creed of resignation, the Bible resolutely affirmed that the good life was rooted in earthly existence, in creation, for the Genesis narrative begins with the bold proclamation that “God created the heavens and earth... and He saw that it was good.”xlii The early Christians believed that our humanity as embodied creatures was glorified, as humans are both bearers of the imago Dei and the crowning act of creation. In fact, even the naming of Adam, the xxxii

St. Paul preaching in Athens

by Rafael, 1515

first man, serves as an exaltation of man’s terrestrial nature for his name derives from the Hebrew adamah, which means “earth.” Christians saw God’s provisions for Adam and Eve in vocation, food, and sexuality as a profound affirmation of their terrestrial existence and goodness.xliii This theme of creation’s goodness echoes throughout Scripture, and in particular in two aspects of Christian belief: instructions for worship and the Incarnation.

Christian worship—which is integral to a Christian conception of the good life—is intimately tied to creation. Christians believed that in the Torah, God commanded the Israelites to celebrate and worship Him through earthly goods such as food and wine.

Deuteronomy, for instance, provides a beautiful portrait of fellowship with God through creation: Be sure to set aside a tenth of all that your fields produce each year. Eat the tithe of your grain, new wine and olive oil, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks in the presence of the LORD your God at the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name, so that you may learn to revere the LORD your God always. (Deuteronomy 14:22-23)xliv

Throughout the Old Testament, God repeatedly affirms the value of earthly goods by blessing the Israelites with creation’s bounty: the yearly harvest, new wine, rain to nourish the land, rich feasts in celebration of God’s faithfulness to the covenant. God then invites man to His presence to worship and celebrate through His terrestrial provisions. This imagery carries over even to the final scene of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament canon, in the wedding banquet of Christ and the marriage of Heaven and Earth. Consequently, the Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann observes that “worship has nothing to do with turning from this profane world to another sacred world,”xlv in marked contrast to the Gnostics and Neoplatonists. To the contrary, “worship depends on this world”xlvi for “it is this world (and not any ‘other world’), it is this life (and not any ‘other life’) that were given to man to be a sacrament of the divine presence, given as communion with God, and it is only through this world, this life, by transforming them into communion with God that man was meant to be.”xlvii There is nothing otherworldly about Christian worship. For the Christian, a deep awe and affinity for creation pervades his devotion to God.

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The Incarnation, the climax of the biblical narrative, reiterates this theme of creation’s goodness. Christians believed that Christ, “being the very nature God... was found in the appearance of a man.”xlviii To the Gnostics and Neoplatonists who believed that the body was evil and the divine was immaterial, the gospel of God coming down as a man appeared nothing less than scandalous and blasphemous. To the Stoic who saw material deprivation as nothing, the cross was “foolishness,” for it, ironically, affirms earthly goods. To the Stoic, a sacrifice is really no sacrifice at all because there is no value lost in making a sacrifice. For the Christian, “much is lost and there is great pain because of the value of the things sacrificed.”xlix The philosopher Charles Taylor writes, The Stoic sage is willing to give up some “preferred” thing, e.g., health, freedom, or life, because he sees it genuinely as without value since only the whole order of events which, as it happens, includes its negation or loss, is of value. The Christian martyr, in giving up health, freedom, or life, doesn’t declare them to be of no value. On the contrary, the act would lose its sense if they were not of great worth. To say that greater love hath no man that this, that a man give up his life for his friends, implies that life is a great good. The sentence would lose its point in reference to someone who renounced life from a sense of detachment; it presupposes he is giving up something.l Thus, contrary to Nietzsche’s portrayal, Jesus’ death on the cross can be viewed not only as a testament of unfathomable love from the divine but also as the affirmation of life. For this reason, Christians hailed the Incarnation as the decisive turning point in history when God began His restoration of creation. The salvation brought by Christ “promises not liberation from, but glorification of, material creation.”li True, the world was fallen and tarnished by evil—but it was not irredeemable. Whereas the Gnostics and Neoplatonists saw this world as a temporary and regrettable way station in their pilgrimage to the spiritual realm, Christians saw earth, in some sense, as their permanent home. Furthermore, Scripture does not speak of an eschatological and a final disembodied existence for the faithful but rather a new life in resurrected bodies in a renewed creation, in which heaven comes down to earth.lii Our actions on earth, therefore, genuinely matter since the earth is not ephemeral, later to be committed to the flames. It is here to stay, destined to be renewed by God and the works of his servants.liii Christianity, thus, entered history with a message of hope and joy. The church boldly proclaimed the

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goodness of the world and the beginnings of its reclamation through the Incarnation at a time when its pagan contemporaries eagerly sought to sever their connection to the world. David Bentley Hart writes, [T]he Christianity of the early centuries did not invade a world of noonday joy, vitality, mirth, and cheerful earthiness, and darken it with malicious slanders of the senses or chill it with a severe and bloodless otherworldliness. Rather, it entered into a twilit world of pervasive spiritual despondency and religious yearning, not as a cult of cosmic renunciation... but as a religion of glad tidings, of new life, and that in all abundance. It was pagan society that had become ever more otherworldly and joyless, ever wearier of the burden of itself... It was pagan society that seemed unable to conceive of any spiritual aspiration higher than escape... [I] t was obliged to proclaim, far more radically than any other ancient system of thought, the incorruptible goodness of the world, the original and ultimate beauty of all things, inasmuch as it understood this world to be the direct Creation of the omnipotent God of love.liv Similarly, Chesterton writes, “Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian”lv because he sees the Gospel and biblical narrative as unashamedly life-embracing. The early Church found shalom and happiness in God and His blessing of the earthly life. It was the Church who preached that our life here was weighed down not with shame, but with glory. Blessed was the Christian for he saw that the divine bids us neither to depart from nor forsake our terrestrial home to experience the full life but enters into our world and our history to restore richly—For He has already done it once. i.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans.

Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) 542-43. ii.

Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1945) 251. iii.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2009) 236. iv.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 134-143. v.

Although it is true that Gnosticism was not strictly pagan, it is nevertheless clear that its Greco-Roman philosophical heritage led to it bearing much semblance to the pagan ethos despite borrowing Christian elements. vi.

Ibid. 134-136.

Oskar Skarsaune, In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002) 248. viii.

Alister McGrath, Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth (New York: HarperOne, 2009) 120. ix.

Skarsaune 246. x.

McGrath 117. xi.

William C. Placher, A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983) 46. xii.

Hart 140. Gnostics regarded their non-Gnostic peers as “soulless brutes for whom death is simply dissolution” or “subjects of the demiurge,” neither of which amounting to much before the Gnostic God (e.g. in The Second Treatise of the Great Seth). xiii.

A.H. Armstrong, “Dualism: Platonic, Gnostic, and Christian.” Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, ed.

Richard T. Wallis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) 46. xiv.

Ibid. xv.

Ibid. xvi.

Skarsaune 246. xvii.

Armstrong 46. xviii.

Hart 142-143. xix.

David Naugle, “Stoic and Christian Conceptions of Happiness,” 6-11. xx.

Malcolm Schofield, “Stoic Ethics.” The Cambridge Companion to The Stoics, ed. Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 243-244. xxi.

Naugle 9-12. xxii.

Cicero quoted in R.W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996) 100-101. xxiii.

Brad Inwood, “Stoicism.” Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume II, From Aristotle to Augustine, ed. David Furley (London: Routledge, 1999) 245246. xxiv.

This is not to say that Stoics were completely without feeling. Nevertheless, all “good” passions were limited to virtue. xxv.

Naugle 15. xxvi.

Epictetus quoted in Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Third Edition (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003) 366. xxvii.

E.G. Sihler, From Augustus to Augustine: Essays & Studies Dealing with the Contact and Conflict of Classic Paganism and Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923) 151. xxviii.

Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, “Neo-Platonism.”

Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume II, From Aristotle to Augustine, ed. David Furley (London: Routledge, 1999) 363. xxix.

Edward Moore, “Plotinus.” Internet

Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last updated May 12, 2008. xxx.

Emilsson 366-367. xxxi.

Plotinus, Plotinus, with an English Translation

by A.H. Armstrong, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966) 221. xxxii.

Moore. xxxiii.

Denis O’Brien, “Plotinus on Matter and Evil.”

The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 172-187. xxxiv.

Hart 143. xxxv.

Armstrong 47. This should not, however, be taken as the only Neoplatonist response. Others would say something along the lines of “How poor, trivial and inadequate a thing the image is compared with the original.” xxxvi.

Charles Elsee, Neoplatonism in Relation to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908) 57. xxxvii.

O’Brien 183. xxxviii.

Moore. xxxix.

Theaetetus 176b. xl.

Sihler 147. xli.

John Peter Kenney, The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading The Confessions (New York: Routledge, 2005) 46. xlii.

Genesis 1:1, 25. xliii.

Naugle 25. xliv.

Deuteronomy 14:22-23. xlv.

Alexander Schmemann, qtd in Naugle 28. xlvi.

Ibid. xlvii.

Ibid. xlviii.

Philippians 2:6,8. xlix.

Naugle 29. l.

Charles Taylor, qtd in Naugle 29. li.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) 151. lii.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008) 104-106, 122. liii.

Ibid 208-209. liv.

Hart, Atheist Delusions, 143-144. lv.

Chesterton 238.

vii.

Suiwen Liang is from Memphis, Tenessee. He is a Chemistry and Philosophy double major.

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Christianity and Meaningful Work

by Shengzhi Li

I

n his classic text Working, Studs Terkel shares hundreds of interviews with American workers from all walks of life: farmer to factory worker, hooker to CEO. Each experience is unique, due to both the differing natures of the jobs and the differing personalities of the individuals. A common strand is that many people dislike their jobs; they are in it for the money. But even among those who enjoy their work, there is often still a desire for a deeper meaning in work. The words of one interviewee, a writer named Nora Watson, capture this spirit: “I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”i In fact, evidence reveals that both blue- and whitecollar workers suffer from a deprivation of meaning at work and that even those in lucrative jobs often crave more meaning.ii The lengthy hours and demanding, often pointless, work characteristic of many contemporary professions have given rise to countless parodies. For example, the legal profession was recently lampooned in a notable law review article titled, “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession.”iii Even in medicine, which is perceived as one of the

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most benign professions, many doctors report feeling increasingly “besieged” in their work, spending increasing amounts of time on bureaucratic matters.iv But why is meaningful work important? Certainly, people want it. But this want is not a simple want; it is not like the desire for a chocolate sundae, to be relished and forgotten in a few moments. For without meaningful work, human life itself becomes fragmented. Instead of constituting a vital part of a coherent life, work takes on an increasingly instrumental role of providing income, while leisure and family life become our abodes for enjoyment—or perhaps escapes from work.v Our work life is used to finance our leisure life, and our leisure life to sustain our work life. Slowly, many are driven into vicious cycles of intense work and intense consumption, epitomized by the term “golden handcuffs.”

But one might wonder, is this tandem relationship between work and leisure natural? Can things ever be different? To answer these questions, we require a comprehensive and compelling philosophy of work. Such a philosophy would have to take into account both objective factors—issues such as the minimum wage, work conditions, economic inequality, etc.—and subjective factors—the effect of work on the worker and

A Veteran In A New Field by Winslow Homer, 1836-1910

especially the meaning of work. The Christian view on work is one such comprehensive view.vi As objective factors already find significant discussion in the mainstream,vii however, this article will focus solely on the subjective dimension.

In particular, it will give Christianity’s answers to two questions: what is the purpose of work for workers?

And how does work fit into workers’ lives? The view this article will present has been mostly guided by Catholic social doctrine, though it also owes a particular debt to the writing of Miroslav Volf.viii However, this view is not exclusively Catholic; a great deal of what is said draws upon Scripture and finds agreement among many Protestants.ix Moreover, a great deal of Christian social doctrine generally proceeds from natural reason and does not depend on revelation; as such, it is relevant for all peoples, including non-Christians.x In answer to the two questions, the Catholic Church affirms four essential truths about work: work is a duty; work is good for man; work is for God; and work ought to be

from agriculture to industry to intellectual work.xiv Dominion also does not mean to use and abuse as one pleases; rather, it is a call to both work the earth and take care of it, not to destroy nature but rather to live sustainably within it.xv Indeed, man is a steward of nature, for all the creation, not only man, is the precious work of God.xvi This call to subdue the earth is not an arbitrary whim of God, but is for the good of man. Man is not made for work, but rather work for man.xvii After all, if God wishes to create, He does not need the aid of man.

Rather, it is man that needs God and work to realize himself: to grow and find happiness as a human being.

Indeed, work is a noble endeavor. Jesus himself worked as a carpenter for many years,xviii and He testified that both He and the Father were constantly at work.xix But why do we need work? In some senses, the answer is obvious: man needs to work to earn his daily bread, to support his family, and to be charitable toward his neighbors.xx

Man is not made for work, but rather work for man. balanced with rest. These four aspects will be discussed in turn.

Man’s original duty to work comes from the commandment in Genesis to subdue the earth.xi The establishment of dominion is a call to discover and use all of the resources of the earth for man’s needs.vii While dominion does not equate to work, it is clear that work is an essential part of it.xiii All work is included, ranging

In a greater sense, however, our work is a fulfillment of our nature as social beings. In the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians, St. Paul posits the vivid image of humanity as the body of Christ. Just as a body has many different but interconnected parts, so it is with society.

And as each part of the body must work in harmony— each fulfilling its proper task—in order for the whole body to flourish, so must individuals in society each

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Christ in the House of His Parents

by John Everett Millais, ca. 1849

fulfill their proper duties for the flourishing of mankind—of the whole body of Christ. Each individual is graced by God with gifts, and it is his duty to use these gifts in service of his fellow man.xxi Through man’s application of his gifts in service of his fellows, a more just and loving society is brought about and the will of God is made manifest on the earth.xxii Further, the use of our gifts in work is not a mere instrument for societal harmony. Work is an end in itself, a process through which we actualize our human nature. In part, we manifest the special gifts with which God has graced each of us as individuals. But moreover, to all man, God also gives the ability to reason: intellectual reason, but also moral reason through the promptings of the Holy Spirit.xxiii That is, every man

client or fulfill one’s duties.xxv This use of our abilities will tend to bring us satisfaction and growth as human beings.xxvi Above all, this self-realization is the meaning of the work.

While work can be a self-realizing activity, it is nevertheless not an unbounded one; work ought not to take over our entire lives. Man is not made for work, but both man and work are ultimately for God.xxvii In the most practical sense, this means that ethics takes priority over economics: “Better a little with righteousness than much gain with injustice.”xxviii This admonition binds us to a just way of life, but in a greater sense, it liberates us from the idolatry to wealth.xxix We are then freed from preoccupations for our bodily sustenance. Instead, we focus our energies on seeking the

Work is an end in itself, a process through which we actualize our human nature. In part, we manifest the special gifts with which God has graced each of us as individuals. is “capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself and with a tendency to self-realization.”xxiv When in our work, we make decisions about the methods and ends of production, we are realizing our rational nature. These decisions may be ponderous, such as legislators’ decisions about the just distribution of economic goods in a society, or less so, such as how to organize an article one is writing for the Apologia—more generally, how to best serve one’s

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Kingdom of God. In turn, God tells us that we need not worry about the material. It is written, “See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.

Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you?”xxx

But it is the case that no man can escape death and that good men rarely can live a life, or even a month or a day, without bad fortune. In fact, the Bible tells the story of Job, the devout man who was tortured endlessly by the Devil for no fault of his own, although in the end God again looked upon him with favor. But while it is surely not wrong to justly acquire wealth and is indeed a positive good to feed and clothe our families, our material fortunes are fragile and transient. xxxi Indeed, mortal life itself is but a fleeting thought: “As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is

for as Jesus taught, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”xxxix It is not merely a ritual observance of a particular calendar day, but rather a call to rest and worship God.xl In a practical sense, the Sabbath is a barrier against exploitation and a restoration of productive energies.xli In a greater sense, it is a time for physical and spiritual renewal, a time to give in charitable activity, a time to spend with family, and a time to delight in God and his works.xlii To summarize, work is a noble activity, necessary to our realization as human beings. Through work, we ought to:

Above all, the purpose of our work is for His glory. Our work is a coherent part of our life given to serve God. gone, and its place remembers it no more.”xxxii In comparison, our spiritual life is eternal. As Jesus spoke, “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.”xxxiii We believe that material life is valuable, but we believe all the more that spiritual life is of infinitely greater value. And the greater things of the spirit are never taken away from us: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”xxxiv Regardless of our material fortunes, we can always strive to use our gifts for the benefit of our fellows, to realize our human nature, and to follow God. Ultimately, in the end times of the world, it is the spiritual things that are glorified: the harmony of our society, the realization of our nature, and our love for and obedience to God. Though material wealth will fade away, these spiritual fruits of our work will not simply be annihilated, for as the author of Revelation writes, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”xxxv Though man cannot by his own power bring about the new earth, the new earth is not an alien world, but a glorification of this one: “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”xxxvi “[W]hile earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ’s kingdom, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God.”xxxvii Thus, the purpose and value of work is both bounded and liberated by our ultimate commitment to God. The time of work is similarly bounded; we must balance work and rest. Man is commanded to rest on the Sabbath Day and to devote a portion of his time to communion with God.xxxviii This is for the good of man,

First, establish dominion over and care for the earth; Second, establish our livelihood and that of our families; Third, act as a member of the body of Christ in bringing about the Kingdom of God; Fourth, fulfill our human nature as beings endowed with moral reason; and Fifth, in all these things, serve God through the use of the gifts He has graced us with, which Sixth, both liberates us from idolatry to material and enables us to live a free life for His glory, and Seventh, commands us to rest on the Sabbath Day. Above all, the purpose of our work is for His glory.

Our work is a coherent part of our life given to serve God. The priority of spirit over material frees us from our preoccupation with the caprices of the material world. For unlike fortune, which smiles only upon the few, and turns away from them at whim, the spiritual world is always open to all who seek. As Christ said, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.”xliii S. Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: The New Press, 1974) 521. ii.

See H. Braverman, Labor and monopoly capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). iii.

P. Schiltz, “On Being a Happy, Healthy, and Ethical Member of an Unhappy, Unhealthy, and Unethical Profession,” Vanderbilt Law Review 52 (2003): 870-950. iv.

C. Horowitz, et al., “What Do Doctors Find Meaningful about Their Work?” Annals Internal Med 138 (2003): 772-5. v.

W. Rybczynski, “Waiting for the weekend,” i.

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The Sabbath Rest by Sanuel Hirszenberg, ca. 1894

Atlantic Monthly 268 (1991): 35-52. 12 Dec. 2011, <http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/91aug/ rybczynski-p1.htm>. vi.

For example, both objective and subjective factors are discussed in Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Compendium) (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2005). vii.

For example, union bargaining tends to center on these objective issues. See R. Freeman, What do unions do? (New York: Basic Books, 1985). viii.

I have primarily referenced Compendium; the encyclical Laborem Exercens (LE) (in G. Baum, The Priority of Labor [Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1982]), and M. Volf, Work in the Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). In Catholicism, also of special importance are the Catechism, the encyclical Rerum Novarum, as well as the letter Economic Justice for All. Note that Volf is a Protestant. ix.

Note that not all Christians will agree with what is presented in this article or the position of the Catholic Church. Discussion of these disagreements is outside the scope of this article. But for example, Prosperity theology (see S. Coleman, The globalisation of charismatic Christianity: spreading the gospel of prosperity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000] for a review and critique) and Weber’s famous articulation of the Protestant Work Ethic (M. Weber and T. Parsons (trans.), The Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism in America (London: Unwin Hyman, 1930) are quite distinct from the view

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presented here. For a review of Christian theology on work, see L. McRae, Preparing for the Eschaton: A Theology of Work (Master’s thesis, University of Waterloo, 2010). A full review of the literature on this is outside the scope of this article. Again, for a review of Christian positions, see McRae. For a well-articulated theology of work by a Protestant, see Volf. For a general review on philosophies of work, see J. Muirhead, Just work, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Among non-Christian authors of the West, the most influential is certainly Karl Marx; especially see his essay on “Estranged Labor” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. For a recent Aristotelian view, see J. Murphy, The moral economy of labor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). Rawlsian liberals have also written about the topic at length in recent years; for example, see N. Hsieh, “Survey Article: Justice in Production,” J Pol Phil 16 (2008), 72-100 for a review of that literature and more recent work by M. O’Neill, “Three Rawlsian Routes Toward Economic Democracy,” Rev de Phil Econ 8 (2009), 29-55. For a view on work and well-being generally, see my On good work (Undergraduate thesis, Dartmouth College, forthcoming). x.

Compendium, xviii. Note also that many parts of Christian social doctrine are influenced by Aristotle (especially for example the work of St. Thomas).

Further, the Catholic focus on the subjective dimension of work is highly reminiscent of the Hegelian and Marxian views on objectification (see

LE, 6.

However, the opportunity for workers to realize themselves in this manner varies by person and occupation. Indeed, some individuals are subjected to exceedingly alienating labor that serves as a great obstacle to the realization of their rational (both intellectual and moral) faculties. The classic critique is Marx’s “Estranged Labor.” However, even in the most inhospitable of conditions, it is possible, although more difficult, to realize one’s rational nature. For example, workers in drudgery (in this case dishwashing) do find meaning in work (J. Isaksen, “Constructing Meaning Despite the Drudgery of Repetitive Work,” J of Humanistic Psych 40 (2007) 84, and more generally, people have found meaning even in the direst conditions of concentration camps (V. Frankl, Man’s search for meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959). This is not to say, of course, that we as a society should not care about alienating labor; indeed, we have an obligation to make labor more humane. xxvi.

That the use and development of our rational ability tends to bring satisfaction is a general truth.

For a review of the philosophical view, see J. Rawls, A theory of justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), section 65 on the Aristotelian Principle. For a psychological view, see M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). xxvii.

1 Timothy 6:10-19. xxiii.

Proverbs 16:8. xxix.

Romans 6:23. xxx.

Matthew 6:28-30. xxxi.

Ecclesiastes 1. xxxii.

Psalms 103:15-16. xxxiii.

Matthew 6:20. xxxiv.

Matthew 7:7. xxxv.

Revelation 14:13. xxxvi.

Romans 8:21. xxxvii.

GS, 39. xxxiii.

Hebrews 4:9-10. xil.

Mark 2:27. xl.

Matthew 11:28. xli.

Compendium, 258. Ex 23:10-11. xlii.

Compendium, 284-5. xliii.

Revelation 3:20 xxiv. xxv.

Good Shepherd by Bernard Plockhorst, 19th c.

Baum’s commentary on LE, 18-21). A review of Hegelian and Marxian objectification as applied to work can be found in S. Sayers, “The concept of labor: Marx and his critics,” Sci & Soc 4 (2007), 431454. xi.

Genesis 1:28. xii.

LE, 4. xiii.

LE, 4. xiv.

LE, 5. xv.

Genesis 2:15. xvi.

Psalms 104. xvii.

LE, 6. xviii.

Matthew 13:55. xix.

John 5:17. xx.

Genesis 3:17, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, Ephesians 4:28. xxi.

I discuss the view of work as the fulfillment of gifts (charismata). Another view stresses work as a fulfillment of personal vocation; for example, Luther and Calvin both held this view, and it is the foundation of Weber’s formulation of the Protestant work ethic. These two concepts are not contradictory (that is, our vocation and gifts are related), although they are different. For a useful comparison, see Volf, 105-110. xxii.

1 Corinthians 12:6. Pope Paul VI, Encyclical Letter Gaudium et spes, 39. xxiii.

John 14:26.

Shengzhi Li ‘12 is from Watertown, MA. He is a government and economics double major.

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Reflections on

The Nature of Faith

by Henry Waller

C

hristians and nonbelievers alike recognize that faith has been central to the Christian experience from the religion’s very beginnings.

However, the term faith has lost much of its depth and meaning in recent years. The word has acquired connotations among many that signify the idea of faith as something imprecise and vague, bordering on the mystic. Many of its detractors paint it as a delusion kept alive by either idiocy or fear, adamantly opposed to rationality and reality. Even some of those who defend it limit it to something merely emotionally true. Amidst this diverse set of meanings and interpretations, the term has lost a great deal of its power in the public discourse; people claim that it may be comforting, helpful, admirable, or beneficial, but relatively few claim that it is actually a way of knowing absolute, universal Truth. Yet, the Christian claims this and much more.

The Bible paints faith as something very definite and, moreover, very powerful. Biblical faith, far from adhering to any of these misconceptions, guides all aspects of the Christian believer’s life, setting Christianity apart from all other religions and philosophies. In order to fully examine its intricacies and possible merits,

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we must rescue faith from its current place in the public discourse. When we do so, we see that many modern notions of faith are misguided, some are partially correct, but few capture the full meaning of what faith is to Christians.

In recent times, faith has become a sort of euphemism for religion that avoids the formal and legalistic connotations of the latter term. Though society seems to recognize that religions are mutually exclusive—they all have different practices and different truth claims— many argue that different faiths can be compatible, since faith, being a personal decision, is ostensibly limited to the believer’s psyche or individual experience. Because this position holds that faith is merely an individual reality, it follows that separate notions of faith cannot contradict each other. This notion of the equivalence of faith and religion has grown in popularity because it fits into today’s postmodern age well.

However, substituting faith for religion obscures what Christians see as faith’s true nature, presenting it as a matter of doctrine rather than a matter of the heart.

Because this usage implies that faith is defined by creed, it suggests that faith merely consists of assenting

to a Muslim set of beliefs or a Christian set of beliefs.

This de-emphasizes the differences between different religions’ approaches to belief. Furthermore, it hides the fact that in Christianity, the believer places his faith in a divine being rather than a set of statements.

To argue that faith is exclusively a religious preference conceals the role that faith of all types plays in the lives of all men. The misuse of this term obscures the fact that faith is not always a religious exercise as traditionally thought, for we often place blind trust in— indeed, exalt—the nondivine. All people place faith in certain things, trusting them to provide sustenance, comfort, or happiness. Diehard secularists such as today’s “New Atheists,” at the same time as they mock faith in general, often place faith in the scientific enterprise as the ultimate source of all possible knowledge.

Consider this quote from psychologist Steven Pinker: “Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.”i Secular philosophy invokes faith as well; what is Camus’ existentialism if not faith in the individual to create meaning for himself? Today, the religious and the secular alike look for fulfillment not in teachings or rituals but in their own self-righteousness, wealth, beauty, or intelligence. A Christian from suburban America (or for that matter,

truth will set you free.”iv But to the Christian, faith differs strongly from the “absence of reason” definition invoked by Harris, Richard Dawkins, and many of their cohorts. First, Harris makes an assumption that the available evidence fully disproves Christianity, and that accepting the religion’s claims about the world requires the repudiation of what the believer rationally knows.

Exploring the archaeological, historical, and scientific evidence concerning the Christian religion and the Bible is beyond the scope of this article; however, a strong case can and has been made for a scientifically accurate and historically reliable Christianity. A short list of scientists who saw no conflict between Christian teachings and science includes Francis Collins (director of the National Institutes for Health and the Human Genome Project), Michael Faraday, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Isaac Newton.v Though faith and scientific empiricism certainly differ from each other, by making a claim based on faith, Christians do not claim that their religion is counterfactual.

Faith does not act as a competitor to science; rather, it operates on an entirely different epistemological level. Harris assumes that the only valid method of obtaining knowledge is scientific inquiry and that people invoke faith only when the former does not conform

Today, the religious and the secular alike look for fulfillment not in teachings or rituals but in their own self-righteousness, wealth, beauty, or intelligence. his atheist neighbor) will more likely believe that a new car can bring him happiness than believe that Hindu gods are his answer. Pastor Timothy Keller writes of modern society, “We may not physically kneel before the statue of Aphrodite, but many young women today are driven into depression and eating disorders by an obsessive concern over their body image.”ii Few would argue that having faith in the ability of a better body image to provide self-worth is a direct assault on reason. Faith in its most general form is not alien to the secular man; in many of its manifestations, it is complementary to reason, not opposed to it. Those who vehemently denounce faith ignore its presence across the entire spectrum of human existence.

Perhaps the most pervasive misconception of faith is that it is, as secular polemicist Sam Harris claims, “nothing more than the license religious people give themselves when reasons fail.”iii Harris assumes that Christianity is a distorted form of science, trading in rational thought for blind acceptance. Faith, in his view, is a crutch used to support something the believer knows to be untrue. Such a Christianity would be selfcontradictory; Jesus, after all, famously said that “the

to their preconceptions. Faith, then, is limited to answering questions such as, “Does God exist?” or, “Is evolution real?” and Christianity becomes merely a collection of facts and sayings. Sadly, many Christians take the same view of faith, treating Christianity merely as doctrine. However, Biblical Christianity counters that truth is found not only in matters of science and philosophy but also in the personal knowledge of God. It is one thing to understand the intricate biological processes of a person or the sequence of their DNA, but it is quite another to know them as a friend and share in the intricacies of their personality and love.

The latter is far more illuminating and far more fulfilling. Christian faith accesses the knowledge found in the person of God, a source whose magnitude, the Christian believes, far eclipses that of scientific discovery. This personal knowledge is not at all the irrational assertion that Harris suggests it is, for it is more a collection of verifiable facts. The Christian believes in God in all His faithfulness and goodness, not just that God exists or that he will go to heaven when he dies.

Faith is unscientific (not anti-scientific) in the sense that much of the knowledge claimed by faith is beyond

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the scope of scientific inquiry. Christian faith seeks to obtain knowledge in the context of love and trust, not to function as a substitute for reason.

Truth claims such as God’s existence or the Biblical historical narrative are not the object of Christian faith either, but rather are a starting point. Believing that God exists does not guarantee salvation; it is important insofar as believing in His existence is necessary to enter into a relationship with Him. Believing that God created the earth is necessary not for its own sake but as grounds for worshipping God as Creator and Lord of the universe who exercises complete dominion over it. In fact, examination of God’s creation has incited many scientists to praise God; Copernicus called astronomy “a science more divine than human.”vi To

the problems it claims to solve. But if faith is not merely intellectual assent but is instead, as Christian doctrine teaches, an assurance of the unseen based on previously revealed knowledge, such as God’s creation or historical deeds, then this complaint no longer has merit. If faith is love and trust directed toward God, then it cannot be intended as an easy path to heaven, for to love someone for your own benefit is undoubtedly not actual love. Love means sharing in each other’s sorrow and joy; Paul writes that we become “heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.”ix Being faithful to Christ requires rejecting the advances of sin and idolatry, which is by no means easy. Though faith differs sharply from achieving life through merit,

What we recognize as scientific or historical facts are all part of the fabric that provide us clues to who God is. the Christian, what we recognize as scientific or historical facts are all part of the fabric that provide us clues to who God is, along with His presence in our lives and the lives of others, the words of the Bible, the existence of morality, and much more. The First Commandment, in fact, paints historical knowledge as the foundation of faith, stating, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”vii God is worthy of trust because of the historical, factual record of what He has done, in this case rescuing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The psalmist Asaph also drew on history to place his faith in God, writing, “To this I will appeal: the years of the right hand of the most high.”viii Knowing who God is­—through history, nature, the Bible, personal relationship, and much more—enables us to love Him for who He is.

The Bible integrates empirical evidence into a much broader picture of knowledge centered on God. Many critics have dismissed Christianity because they consider faith to be merely an excuse for believing something that is overtly counterfactual.

Understanding belief in Jesus as merely an intellectual decision, and a seemingly pointless one at that, these critics do not see how believing in Jesus can lead to salvation, and consider faith to be nothing more than a cosmic “get out of jail free” card. It is easy to see why this view would cause concern; one person can say they believe in Jesus while being a murderer and yet find their way into heaven, while someone who is kind and unselfish without believing in Jesus would be condemned to hell. Salvation through faith is then a form of cheap grace. Faith, they reason, fails to solve

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it requires effort and investment. To label it a cop-out would be erroneous.

Faith is a transitive concept, requiring an object; furthermore, it is only as good as its object. Faith without an object does not achieve anything, for in exercising faith, we invest trust and effort in something that is believed to have the ability to secure what is sought. Therefore, we must examine Jesus Christ, the object of Christian faith, to understand the unique nuances of Christianity. Christians hold by faith that the only cure for the world’s maladies is the person of Jesus Christ, who is the bridge between God and man. Paul writes that in Him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”x The Bible abounds with similar statements; He is the “bread of life,”xi “the good shepherd,”xii and “the author and perfecter of our faith.”xiii The overarching picture of Jesus in the Bible is that He is the Lord God himself and the agent of human salvation. The Christian believes not just that Jesus exists, but also in His full identity as Lord and Savior. But what does faith in Jesus look like? Since Jesus is a person, faith in Him is a personal faith; it is a relationship, actualized when the individual turns to Jesus. Much like a child trusts his parents to protect, shelter, and feed him, Christians have faith in Jesus to fulfill His promises, to be the bread of life or the Good Shepherd as He claimed to be. Faith is love that requires obedience; if one believes that Jesus is Lord, he must act as servant. True faith serves as a basis for the Christian’s actions. If the individual says he believes in Jesus but does not seek Him as he walks through life, it is hard to argue that he actually believes that Jesus is the solution to his present predicament. Here

Portrait of Nicolaus Copernicus, 15th century

Christianity proves itself infinitely more complex than merely consenting to a set of dogmatic claims. Such claims require nothing from those who hold them; the Christian life, however, is a life of deep devotion.

In practice, faith in a person shows itself to be far different than faith in an idea or law. Placing faith in someone entails basing your actions on their adequacy to fulfill your needs. Personal faith is significantly deeper than faith in an object or an idea, for the most significant desires and insecurities are embedded in the fabric of interpersonal relationships. Interpersonal relationships are built on faith. This holds true for a

the law, Christianity claims that life comes through a faithful and loving relationship. In the case of a child’s faith in his parents, faith is an admission of helplessness. He trusts them to provide because he knows he cannot provide for himself. The Christian’s faith is the same; he expects God to secure for him life and truth and whatever else he may need. Jonathan Edwards writes, “There is an absolute and universal dependence of the redeemed on God.”xv In its humility, Christianity separates itself from faith in scientific progress, where humanity thinks that its own ingenuity will solve its problems, and faith in self-righteousness, which asserts that men can achieve life with their own good deeds.

Both of these common idols are man’s projection of himself, whereas faith in the God of the Bible denies this notion of man’s adequacy. Nevertheless, it calls man more dignified than these other philosophies do; it claims that man possesses infinite worth as God’s creation and the object of God’s sovereign love. In the creation story, God calls man “very good” after creating him.xvi Unlike many other philosophies, Christian faith coheres with an understanding of man’s sinfulness and inability to save himself. Christianity’s emphasis on relational faith distinguishes it from all other religions, worldviews, and ways of life.

In Christian belief, by exercising faith in God the individual accepts His offer of abundant and eternal life.

Life is obtained through faith not because faith makes one a better person, but because life comes from God alone. How can one receive life if he looks for it somewhere else? Paul writes that God “will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith;”xvii that is, God declares all people righteous who have faith, and faith is the difference between life with God and life without Him. Therefore the merit of Christianity is directly tied to the merit of faith. If faith does not work, then the gospel is proved false.

Life is obtained through faith not because faith makes one a better person, but because life comes from God alone. husband and a wife; a faithful husband knows that he cannot find satisfaction in any other woman. In fact, the Bible frequently uses marital fidelity as a metaphor for God’s actions toward his people and the faith they are supposed to have in them.xiv This differs sharply from the perception in today’s popular dialogue that religious faith is a matter of the mind rather than the heart. With its emphasis on faith, Christianity uniquely recognizes the centrality of personal relationships.

While other major world religions claim that life is found in meditation, self-renunciation, or following

And the most common caricatures of faith do not, in fact, work in the reality of a fallen, sinful world under a just God. Doctrinal assent achieves nothing; it provides no pathway to the cancellation of sin or renewed life. If Christianity is true, then only God manifesting His identity and fulfilling His promises can cancel sin.

Saving faith is trust that God will bring this reality to fruition through the work of Jesus; in other words, it is a conviction that God is all-powerful, loving, and faithful to His people. Saving faith requires a life conducted in a completely different manner. It requires

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pursuit after Jesus at the expense of all other salvation projects, such as sex, wealth, or self-righteousness. It requires adherence to God’s commands, not as a path to righteousness but rather as a sign of love and loyalty to the One who has loved you and been loyal to you so much that He is the definition of love and faithfulness.

When Jesus, in perhaps His most famous pronouncement ever, said that “whoever believes in [Me] shall not perish but have eternal life,”xviii it is impossible against that backdrop of the whole fabric of His teaching to conclude that His directive was merely to change your mind about His divinity. He also commanded, “I am the true vine […] abide in me”xix and stated, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”xx The disciples Peter and Andrew were called to leave their professions and hometowns to follow an itinerant preacher.xxi In certain examples, Jesus required of prospective followers that they give up all their riches to the poorxxii or that they bypass burying their father.xxiii Biblical faith is a firm belief in the adequacy of the person of Christ and the resulting complete devotion at the expense of all else. To have faith is to obey. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and anti-Nazi conspirator, lived out this view, dying at the hands of the Gestapo in pursuit of obeying God in his situation, a task that he felt meant actively opposing the Nazi regime. He wrote on the topic, “For faith is only real when there is obedience, never without it, and faith only becomes faith in the act of obedience.”xxiv Obedience occurs upon trusting who God is; it is a response to His faithfulness. Theologian J.I. Packer points out that faith is, in addition, sacrificial, writing that in faith “you give yourself to God on the basis of his promise to give himself to you.”xxv The difficulty of the Christian faith supports its epistemological validity.

Faith, therefore, entails a complicated set of definitions for the Christian. Since faith is the principle guiding all Christian conduct, it is necessary to adopt it not on a whim but rather out of a core conviction that it is the only way to properly live life. Many people, misunderstanding the nature of faith, reject this conviction, aghast at centering their lives on something that is at best trivial and at worst anti-intellectual. Faith for them equates to belief in a set of seemingly random and irrelevant propositions. Biblical faith, however, requires great effort; it changes actions as well as thoughts.

Rather than being a blind acceptance of dogma, faith invokes the interesting concept of personal relationship, setting Christianity apart from other religions and philosophies. Its prevalence in everyday life supports its epistemological validity. Furthermore, the notion of relational knowledge is intuitively appealing as an epistemological standard given the fascinating and

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incomprehensible nature of interpersonal interaction.

Not only is it acceptable; those who examine the present human condition conclude that faith is the only possible course of action. With the seriousness of sin and the adequacy of God, faith in Jesus Christ is not just a palatable option but rather the only path to life.

Steven Pinker, “Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?” John Templeton Foundation, 13 Feb. 2012, <http://www.templeton.org/belief/>. ii.

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters (New York: Dutton, 2009), xii. iii.

Sam Harris, “Selling Out Science,” Free Inquiry, 26:1, 2005: 15. iv.

John 8:32. v.

Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity (Washington: Regnery, 2007) 97. vi.

Ibid. vii.

Exodus 20:2-3. viii.

Psalm 78:10. ix.

Romans 8:17. x.

Colossians 2:3. xi.

John 6:35. xii.

John 10:14. xiii.

Hebrews 12:2. xiv. cf. Hosea 3:1, Revelation 19:7-8. xv.

Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Edwards on Knowing Christ (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth Trust, 1990) 35. xvi.

Genesis 1:31. xvii.

Romans 3:30. xviii.

John 3:16. xix.

John 15:1-4. xx.

Matthew 16:24. xxi.

Matthew 4:18-22. xxii.

Luke 18:22. xxiii.

Luke 9:59-60. xxiv.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 1959) 64. xxv.

J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1973) 277. i.

Henry Waller ‘15 is from Birmingham, AL. He is a history major.

Neostoicism and Theodicy: Justus Lipsius on the Problem of Evil

by Peter Osorio

I

n 1583, Flemish philologist and classical scholar Justus Lipsius wrote to a friend, saying, “I know of none among the ancients more characterized

by Christian piety than those from the Stoic school.”i Stoicism, a Hellenistic philosophy that predates Christianity by about 300 years, had a mixed reception by early Christian writers. While Latin apologists like Tertullian and Lactantius generally had a positive view of Stoicism and even used Stoic ideas in their writing, others, such as Augustine, rejected Stoicism along with all pagan systems of thought.ii As a humanist of the Renaissance, Lipsius believed ancient Greek and Latin writers had something valuable to offer to a contemporary audience. Two years later, Lipsius would publish his most popular treatise, De Constantia Libri Duo (“Two Books on Constancy”), in which he seeks to console his fellow countrymen against the loss and hardships that have accompanied the Dutch War of Independence. To this end, Lipsius borrows from Stoicism to construct a philosophical argument to resolve the problem of evil. Despite its good intentions and apolitical nature, the De Constantia was a

controversial work to many scholars and clergymen— Catholic and Protestant alike. Shortly after its publication, Lipsius wrote to Laevinus Torrentius, vicar general of the archbishop of Liege, defending himself against the charge of “a lack of piety” for his indulgent use of Stoicism as opposed to Christian scripture. Lipsius writes to Torrentius, “I know not what inspiration lies in the writings of Seneca and Epictetus, which also comes upon the reader. Nor do they seem to just scatter virtue to him, but rather to sow and cultivate it.”iii For Lipsius, Stoicism did not stand in the way of his faith, but rather stood to complement and strengthen it. As Lipsius’ most popular work, the De Constantia would become seminal to Neostoicism, a syncretic Renaissance movement that sought to revive Stoicism and harmonize it with Christianity. Two decades later, Lipsius also wrote two handbooks on Stoicism— Manuductio ad Stoicam Philosophiam and Physiologiae Stoicorum (1604)—that provide a comprehensive outline of Stoic ethics and physics by quoting various ancient sources. In this article, I briefly examine Lipsius’ adaption of Stoicism to one common objection raised

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against the Stoics and today’s Christians alike: the problem of evil. To many, the existence of evil is problematic to belief in an omnipotent, providential, and beneficent God. I preface here that my intention is not to argue that Stoicism is compatible with all Christian perspectives or to judge how successful Lipsius’ syncretism was. Rather, I will outline how Lipsius himself explained the problem of evil, and I leave it to you, the reader, to create your own opinion regarding its utility.

Lipsius’ theodicy, as presented in the De Constantia (abbreviated DC in the footnotes) and supplemented in the Physiologiae Stoicorum (abbreviated PS), relies on his theories of causation, providence, and fate. I will begin by outlining his thoughts on these issues before I turn to their ethical applications Lipsius begins his exposition of Stoic physics in the Physiologiae with the assertion of a duality in the nature of things, called the active and the passive principles. iv The former is commonly called cause or reason, and the latter is known as matter. Lipsius, quoting Seneca,v says “Matter lies inert…and would be inactive if no one should move them: but the Cause, that is Reason, forms Matter, and turns it into whatever way it wants: from this it produces many diverse things.”vi Any material body, then, is understood as qualified matter; the active principle qualifies the matter, and the matter is what is qualified. Due to this active principle, bodies have qualitative states and properties that allow them to act or be acted upon by other qualified bodies. For the Stoics, God is identified as the active principle.vii Lipsius follows suit and identifies God as the source of all activity, reason, and causation; he concludes, “I say that Nature is God and Matter. But the former is greater, since still He sowed the world and breathed into this mass and sustains it.”viii God, then, is present in all corporeal bodies, providing all qualitative states and faculties.

The assertion of providence (i.e., divine will) is central to Lipsius’ Stoic conception of God. If God is present in all bodies as the active principle, then “Nothing is without cause, though chance appears great: but there is something hidden of a divine plan by which they are arranged.”ix God not only created the world, but He is actively present within it as He “regulates, harmonizes, and governs… all things above and below.”x The cosmos according to Lipsius, then, is purposively determined according to God’s will. Even more, God achieves this through a causal network, called fate, which interrelates and links all causes to each other. Further, this network of causation is immutable and eternal by virtue of God’s perfection.xi To the objection that this limits God’s freedom or power, Lipsius refers to Seneca, saying, “Nor is God less free or able because of this [Fate], for He himself is what is

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Portrait of Justus Lipsius, Peter Paul Rubens, 1612

necessary.”xii Simply put, a changing order of causation would imply a priori that God was imperfect.

For the Stoics, the consequence of providence and fate is that the world is determined, in all its details, by causes. Ancient and modern readers often object to determinism for its problematic implications regarding necessity, goal-directed behavior, and moral responsibility.xiii Lipsius provides a response to each of these issues in both the De Constantia and the Physiologiae, but I limit myself here to review only the issue of moral responsibility.

If my actions are determined by their inclusion in fate, how am I—in any sense—responsible for my behavior? Lipsius this time turns to an analogy from the Stoic Chrysippus for an answer.xiv When I push a cylindrical object and it rolls, there are two categories of causes for the object’s having the predicate “is rolling.” First, I applied a force to the object and began its movement. Second, the cylindrical object, by its very nature, has a property we can call ‘rollability.’ While my applied force was a necessary prerequisite to the cylinder’s rolling, it is the object’s nature—via its rollability—that is directly responsible for the sustained rolling. In Stoic psychology, the rational human mind, called the hegemonikon or ‘directive faculty,’ has the extraordinary faculty of assent, or the ability to choose whether it fulfills potential predicates. Lipsius draws from Cicero’s De fato to explain how this relates to the cylinder:

As when one pushes a cylinder, he gave to it the beginning motion, however he did not give the capacity for rolling: thus a cast sight will imprint an impression in our mind, but the assent will be in our power: and likewise as was said for the cylinder, while it has been pushed on from the outside, as for what remains, it will be moved by its own force and nature.xv

While my actions are fated and conditioned by antecedent causes, they critically depend on my volition, and thus I am morally responsible for my actions. Note that this does not imply that I have the freedom to act in any other way than how my character inclines. Modern conceptions of free will usually involve the idea that we are responsible for our actions only if we truly may have acted otherwise in the circumstantially exact same situation.xvi For Lipsius and the Stoics, freedom to do otherwise is not the criterion for moral responsibility. Instead, we are responsible for our actions because we are autonomous agents and our actions depend on us and require our assent.

An apt reader will now raise the question: how am I responsible for my vice if it arises from a corrupt character that is the result of external or hereditary factors that are beyond my control? Indeed, Lipsius maintains that my actions are determined by my character, defined as the total set of all beliefs about what the mind judges to be beneficial or harmful, appropriate or inappropriate, preferred or not preferred, etc. On the topic of character, Lipsius quotes Aulus Gellius, saying: Although it may be thus, says Chrysippus, that everything is necessarily compelled and connected by Fate and the fundamental reason; nevertheless there are such talents of our minds that they are hence liable to Fate, these talents being ownership of our minds and character. For if they [minds] may be made through nature at the beginning wholesomely and profitably, they cross over without hindrance and manageably that whole force which attacks us from without.

But if indeed they are rough, stupid, and crude, propped up without any supports of sound learning, and if they are pressed on by some slight or non-existent clash of misfortunate fate, they still rush by their own perversity and impetuous will into constant transgressions and failings. And this very thing happens in a sequence of affairs, which may be from reason, being of nature, and necessary, which is called Fate. For it is in the nature itself as if fated and inevitable that bad minds may not be free from sin and error.xvii

From this we find that our characters are determined by antecedent causal factors that are beyond our control, such as our physical environment, upbringing,

education, and other influences during our formative youth. However, these causal factors are all antecedent causes of our character as it exists in the present. Since character is dynamic and often changes, Lipsius argues that our volition is the sustaining cause of our character.xviii But how can a corrupt individual be expected to alter his character? Ultimately, external causes are responsible for the initial establishment of character and they may be required for initiating their eventual reformation, but the individual still earns praise or blame for changes (or lack thereof ) in her character through her own effort and agency.xix While Lipsius does not express this reasoning as lucidly as modern scholars (see fn. 23), he concludes that “…there is a reward for us if we incline to good and a punishment if we incline to bad.”xx With Lipsius’ physical framework established, we now turn to its ethical application to the problem of evil.

Lipsius dissects evils differently in the De Constantia and Physiologiae Stoicorum. In DC 1.7, Lipsius differentiates between true and false evils. From the human perspective, the adjectives bonum (“good”) and malum (“evil”) can refer either to an object that benefits or harms, or moral quality. According to Stoic ethics, the two should really be the same.xxi The wise man derives happiness solely from virtue, defined as certain normative properties of a rational mind, and thus knows that the only harm he may receive is a prospective affliction that would inhibit his present mental clarity. xxii In a corrupt mind, mental afflictions (i.e. passions or vices) result in the false judgment that harm comes from external causes. Supposed “evils” such as poverty, disgrace, weakness, illness and death “…are not in us but around us, and strictly speaking they neither help nor harm the inner man, that is, the mind.”xxiii These externally caused conditions are not evil because they do not harm us per se. What causes us to feel harm in the presence of these “evils” is our mind holding false beliefs. In Physiologiae 1.13, Lipsius distinguishes between natura, externa, and internamala. Natural evils (physical deformities, sickness, disease, etc.) and external evils (war, crime, poverty, etc.) would fall under the term “false evils” in the De Constantia, while internal evils of the mind are the only “true” evils.

Apart from pointing out their misinformed labeling as “evil,” Lipsius provides other consolations against natural and external evils. The first consolation is that they are necessary according to Providence.

Remember, the universe according to Lipsius and the Stoics is providentially determined. By virtue of His omnipotent and loving nature, God has arranged the causal network in the most just and beneficent way. xxiv Uncommon natural evils such as physical deformities derive from natural causes and thus do not lie

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beyond the scope of providence.xxv Common natural evils such as poisonous snakes and deadly plants are only harmful from the human perspective and may eventually prove to be useful.xxvi As for “evils” that are the result of human interaction, Lipsius reminds the reader that God also makes provision for individuals. xxvii Lipsius also refers the reader to Seneca (specifically his treatise De Providentia) who argues that adversity (i.e. poverty, illness, and other forms of deprivation) is actually beneficial to the proficiens (“one seeking wisdom”).xxviii According to Seneca, reliance on good fortune exposes us to unhappiness when our fortunes turn for the worse. Unshakeable happiness is only attainable through reliance on virtue. For one training to reach this state of wisdom, external evils and other adversities serve as mental challenges to overcome.xxix We now come to the problem of true evil: why does God allow evil wills to exist? As previously mentioned, God is present in all things as the rational, active principle. For humans, the directive faculty (i.e. the mind) is closest in kinship and rationality to God. As part of this higher reason, humans have volition, the ability to assent to impulses, and are thus morally responsible for their actions (as I have already mentioned).

After exploring other possibilities, Lipsius concludes, “Therefore don’t inquire into the creation [of internal evil]: you control the cause, and it is volition.”xxx Lipsius provides himself some backing for this position by quoting Augustine: “The evil will is activating to evil deeds; but evils that affect the will do not exist.”xxxi But why can’t we all just have perfectly rational minds?

Lipsius replies that “He [i.e., God] wished to make men free, and it was right for that animal, lofty over all others and near to God. Man was not perfected, if he was not made free.”xxxii This bears similarity to Chrysippus’ theory of ‘necessary concomitants’ according to which there are certain inevitable consequences. xxxiii In the case of the mind, the faculty of assent necessarily requires the ability to make incorrect judgments (i.e., to sin).xxxiv While we are not free from behavioral constraints of character and antecedent causes, we are more in control of our behavior than all other material bodies, save God. This control allows virtue to have real meaning, and, further, brings us closest in kinship with God. The significance of Lipsius’ theodicy is that it relies exclusively on Stoic principles. Though a Christian, Lipsius makes no use of scripture or religious doctrine.

Of course, this led to criticism of Lipsius’ religious faithxxxv and De Constantia would eventually be added to the Spanish Index of Prohibited Books in 1667. xxxvi However, modern scholars have begun to re-evaluate Lipsius’ revival of Stoicism.xxxvii Lipsius turned to Stoicism for his theodicy in order to avoid a religious

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debate that would only fuel further hostilities between the Catholic Church and reformers. A generation before Lipsius, the topic of free will and Providence led to a controversial debate between Erasmus, who published De libero arbitrio (1524), and Luther, who criticized Erasmus as un-Christian, with his De servo arbitrio (1525). Finally, it is not my intention to say whether or not Lipsius successfully made Stoicism compatible with Christianity, or whether Lipsius’ arguments have sufficient precedent in Church doctors or Scripture. Lipsius himself admits in his preface to De Constantia that he speaks as a philosopher, not as a theologian.xxxviii As Lipsius’ primary goal was not theology or religious truth, but consolation during the Dutch rebellion against the Spanish throne, he fashioned his De Constantia so that he could benefit those of both Catholic and Protestant persuasion. I conclude with a quote from Lipsius’ preface to his second edition (1585) of De Constantia: My intention is everywhere good. If in some place this human tongue or pen has slipped, I pray that I not be called to an excessively severe account. For I am one of those for whom piety is in the heart rather than on the lips, and who would fiercely prefer that it be practiced in deeds rather than words. And I am not so happy with this age (I venture to say), than which none was ever more prolific of religions, more barren of devotion. What controversies everywhere! What brawls! And when they will have finally done everything, when they have traversed heaven and earth on a wing of subtle wit; what else is left them, but to say as Socrates in Aristophanes, ‘They tread the air?’xxxix i.

Justus Lipsius, Cent. Duae 1.33: Scio non alios e priscis magis consentire cum Christiane pietate, quam eos qui e Stoica domo. Translations of Lipsius’ letters and the Physiologiae Stoicorum are my own.

For translation of the De Constantia, I refer to R.V. Young, Justus Lipsius’ Concerning Constancy (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011). ii. See Marcia Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: Vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1985). iii. Justus Lipsius, Cent. Duae 1.97: Spirat nescio quis calor in Senecae aut Epicteti scripti, qui ad lectorem quoque pervenit: nec disserere illi magis de virtute videntur, quam inserere et inculare. iv. Justus Lipsius, Iusti Lipsi Physiologiae Stoicorum Libri Tres, (Antwerp: Apud Christophorum Plantinum) 1.14. v. Seneca the Younger (1st cent. C.E.): Stoic philosopher of the Roman Stoa who wrote a large corpus of Latin philosophical works, including moral epistles and philosophical dialogues.

1.4; cf. Sen. Ep. 65.2: Materia iacet iners, res ad omnia parata, cessatura si nemo moveat: Causa autem, id est Ratio, Materiam format, et quocumque vult, versat: ex illa varia opera producit. vii. PS 1.4. viii. PS 1.5: et Deum Naturam dici, et Materiam. Sed illum maxime, quatenus tamen insertus est Mundo, et molem hanc animat, continetque. ix. PS 1.11: Nihil est a casu, ubi casus maxime apparet: sed occultum aliquid divini consilii est, quo diringuntur x. Justus Lipsius, Iusti Lipsi De Constantia Libri Duo, (Antwerp, Apud Ioannem Wechelum et Petrum Fischerum consortes) 1.13: quae denique omnes res superas, inferas temperat, moderator, gubernat. xi. PS 1.12; cf. Gel.7.2.1: Fatum esse, naturalem compositionem universorum, ab aeterno, mutuo sese consequentium, immutabili et inviolabili hac complicatione. xii. PS 1.12; cf. Sen. Nat. 1.3 preface: Nec Deus ob hoc minus liber aut potes est: ipse enim est Necessitas sua. xiii. For this topic, see Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). xiv. PS 1.14; Gel. 7.7.11. xv. PS 1.13, Cic. Fat. 43: Ut igitur qui protrusit cylindrum, dedit ei principium motionis, volubilitatem autem non dedit, sic visum obiectum inprimet illud quidem et quasi signabit in animo suam speciem, sed adsensio nostra erit in potestate, eaque, quem ad modum in cylindro dictum est, extrinsecus pulsa, quod reliquum est, suapte vi et natura movebitur. xvi. As we have seen, Chrysippus allowed for the idea that counterfactual possibilities exist, but this is not the same as freedom to do otherwise. xvii. PS 1.14; cf. Gel. 7.7-10 xviii. PS 1.15. xix. For the Stoics on traits of character, character development, and Stoic psychic theory in general, see Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). xx. PS 1.14: Cum ergo inclinamus; aut praemium nobis iure esse si ad Bona; aut poenam, si ad Mala xxi. For a more comprehensive view of good and bad in Stoic ethics, see A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 368-377. xxii. The Stoic idea of the sapiens (“wise man”) is an ideal benchmark that is rarely ever achieved. xxiii. DC 1.7: Utraque sic appello, quae non in nobis, sed circa nos, quaeque interiorem hunc hominem, id est animum, proprie non iuvant aut laudent. xxiv. DC 1.17. xxv. PS 1.14. xxvi. PS 1.14.

1.14; PS 1.12.

1.15. xxix. DC 2.8; PS 1.16. xxx. PS 1.15: Creationem igitur non quaere: caussam potes. Atque ea est Voluntas. xxxi. Aug. Civ. 12.6-7. xxxii. PS 1.17: Liberum fecisse voluit, et decuit, illum sublimem inter omnia animalia, illum Deo propinquum. Perfectus homo non erat, si liber non erat. xxxiii. Gel. 7.1.9. xxxiv. Gel. 7.1.13. xxxv. For Lipsius’ correspondence with critics such as Laevinus Torrentius, Martin Lydius, and Dirck Coornhert, see René Hoven, “Les réactions de Juste Lipse aux critiques suscitées par la publication du De constantia.” In C. Mouchel (Ed.): Juste Lipse (15471606) en son temps (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997) 413-422.

vi. PS

xxvii. DC

xxviii. PS

xxxvi. (1997).

H. Schrijvers, “Literary and Philosophical Aspects of Lipsius’s De Constantia in Publicis Malis.”

In I. D. McFarlane (Ed.): Acta Conventus NeoLatini Sanctandreani: Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, St Andrews, 24 August to 1 September 1982 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies v. 38,1986) 275–282. xxxviii. J.M. Cooper, “Justus Lipsius and the Revival of Stoicism in Late-Sixteenth-Century Europe.” In N.Brender and L. Krasnoff (Eds.): New Essays on the History of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 7–29. xxxix. DC, Ad Ad lectorem Pro Contantia Mea Praescriptio: Si mihi theologum agree propositum aberravi; si philosopham, cur culpant? (“Had I proclaimed to act as a theologian, then I have strayed. If as a philosopher, why do they find fault?”). xl. Ibid: Mihi quidem mens ubique bona et si alibi humana haec lingua aut calamus titubavit, ne aspere, quaeso, nimis luam. Sum enim ex iis quibus Pietas in corde magis, quam in ore: quique factis exerceri eam acriter malim quam verbis. Nec saeculum hoc satis mihi placet (audebo dicere) quo nullum umquam feracius religionum fuit, sterilius pietatis.Quae contentions ubique? Quae rixae? Et cum omnia fecerint, cum caelum et terram subtilis ingenii ala pervolarint, quid aliud quam, cum Aristophanaeo Socrate aerobatousi? (cf. Aristophanes, Clouds). xxxvii. P.

Peter Osorio ‘12 is a Classical Studies and Economics double major.

He is from Las Vegas, NV.

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Caspar David Friedrich

&

a Christian Understanding of Romanticism

by Nathaniel Schmucker

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t the start of the nineteenth century, Caspar David Friedrich emerged as one of Germany’s most promising young artists. This plain man from Dresden had a love for nature and an enthusiasm for the emerging style of Romanticism. He soon became one of the movement’s leaders, stretching the conventional limits of art and developing a style that filled his paintings with emotion. Making frequent use of beautiful landscapes and window motifs to draw a distinction between the present world and an ideal world, he often painted people staring into the distance to create a deep sense of longing for the ideal.

This longing characterizes Romanticism and, from a Christian perspective, suggests why that era’s art has a continued popular appeal. Romantic art illustrates the doctrine of general revelation, which teaches that dissatisfaction with the world and a desire for something better are natural human emotions.

In his artwork, Friedrich seeks to create an emotion known as Sehnsucht. Sehnsucht is a German word that combines the verbs sich sehnen (to desire) and suchen (to search) and describes an overwhelming desire for both beauty and the search for it. The English language has no equivalent word of its own, but has adopted the German one. The Oxford English Dictionary, which acknowledges Sehnsucht’s use in English dating back to 1847, defines it as a “yearning, wistful longing.”i This is a longing for a beauty and perfection not found in

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this world; Sehnsucht recognizes that the present life is painful, unsatisfying, and incomplete, and suggests that some ideal world exists in which people find happiness. In his paintings, Friedrich conveys Sehnsucht by using beautiful landscapes to depict the ideal world, by using a window motif to contrast it with the present world, and by painting people with their backs to the viewer to create an emotional connection with the work.

Almost without exception, Friedrich paints scenes of nature, which he portrays as beautiful and idyllic.

One of his most famous paintings, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,ii shows a hiker standing on the edge of a precipice, gazing out over a misty valley. Though the wanderer stands in the center of the canvas, the piece focuses on the glorious landscape beyond him. A forest valley filled with rock outcrops stretches into the distance. The green valley turns into rolling hills, which then fade into mountains. A fine white fog fills this beautiful land, blurring the line between the earth and the cloud-filled sky. Even Friedrich’s paintings that portray more mournful scenes—such as the burial in Cloister Cemetery in the Snowiii or the shipwreck in The Sea of Iceiv —still depict nature as a grand and aweinspiring force. In his works, Friedrich exalts nature as something beautiful and desirable.

Through the use of a window motif, Friedrich contrasts this beauty with the frustrating world in which

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrick, 1818

we live. Consider his 1822 painting, Woman at the Window,v which shows a solitary woman looking out of her house through a large window. Friedrich fills most of the canvas with the inside of the house, which he paints simply and darkly, in shades of deep green and brown. The room is drab and, apart from a few bottles by the window, empty. The window, however, offers a glimpse at the outside world. This world, in contrast to the inside of the house, is sunny and bright with a clear sky and tall trees. Consider also the window motif in Friedrich’s painting, The Dreamer.vi Here, a man sits in a large window in the ruins of a monastery. The window contrasts the dark, gloomy stone of what was once the inside of the monastery with the pink and yellow sunrise over the mountains. Some of Friedrich’s other paintings have a subtler window motif. For example, in Chalk Cliffs of Rügen,vii two trees and their branches frame the scene in the painting.

This frame gives the impression of looking through a window at the ocean and the chalk cliffs. As before, the people remain on the inside of the window in a world that is dark and in shadow, and which contrasts the brilliant white cliffs and blue ocean beyond. In each of these three cases, Friedrich uses the window to distinguish between two opposing worlds: one which is the world of nature’s beauty, and one which is the drab world in which people live.

With this distinction established, Friedrich creates a longing for the beautiful world by painting people facing into the distance so that their backs are to the viewer. Other artists before and after Friedrich

occasionally painted figures facing away, but none did it to the same degree as Friedrich. As in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog and Woman at the Window, people play a central role in his paintings. That role, however, is not to draw attention onto themselves, but to focus it onto nature’s beauty. Since these people face away, the viewer’s gaze follows theirs into the background of the paintings. The viewer looks over the misty landscape just as the wanderer does and looks through the window at the trees just as the woman does. Thus the viewer sympathizes with the wanderer and the woman, and feels the same Sehnsucht—the longing for escape from daily life into the beautiful natural world—that the people do.

The feeling of Sehnsucht in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings characterizes Romanticism. Friedrich lived from 1774 to 1840 and painted during the height of the Romantic Era. The other Romantic artists “could praise Friedrich’s landscapes as the visual embodiments of their ideas,”viii chief among which were an emphasis on beauty and the creation of the “melancholy, sentimental longing” known as Sehnsucht.ix Although Friedrich emphasized the window motif and the technique of painting people facing away more than other Romantic painters did, he used it to convey the same ideas that they did—the portrayal of beauty and of Sehnsucht. The works of other Romantic artists, from the German Philipp Otto Runge to the artists of the American Hudson River School, share the common theme of desiring the ideal. Friedrich’s clarity at conveying the ideas of Romanticism, however, made him “a quintessentially Romantic painter.”x This longing for the ideal is not unique to Romanticism’s visual arts, but manifests itself in its other art forms as well. Consider the Grimm Brothers, whose fairy tales create a mysterious world filled with princes, princesses, magic, and romance, and which provides an escape from the pains of daily life.

Consider also the Romantic Era in music. Beethoven was one of this era’s earliest and greatest composers. In The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein says that Beethoven created music that provided a glimpse of perfection and true beauty in the midst of a suffering world. He “turned out pieces of breath-taking rightness. Rightness—that’s the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is the only possible note that can rightly happen at that instant, in that context, then chances are you are listening to Beethoven.”xi Sehnsucht in all its forms—artistic, musical, literary—became a fundamental and defining aspect of Romanticism.

Historians provide an explanation for Sehnsucht’s rise in importance. Romanticism’s emphasis on longing for the ideal developed in part as a response to

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the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had stressed rationality and objectivity in all areas of life. This in turn led to the Industrial Revolution and the growth of metropolises. Though the philosophes saw these as progress, the Romantics saw them as dehumanizing,xii for they created great suffering through long hours of unsafe factory labor, cramped and unsanitary housing, and the great squalor of city slums. Romantics saw the Enlightenment as stressing progress and advancement to the detriment of the general well-being of society.

As Friedrich Hölderlin said of the Enlightenment in his book, Hyperion, [y]ou see artisans, but no men, thinkers, but no men, priests, but no men, masters and servants, but no men, minors and adults, but no men—is this not like a battlefield on which hacked-off hands and arms and every other member are scattered about, while the lifeblood flows from them to vanish in the sand?xiii

Thus to a degree, the Romantics painted, wrote, and composed in reaction to the Enlightenment’s dehumanizing rationalism. They sought to portray beauty so that people could find an emotional escape from the painful life of an industrialized society.xiv This then provides an explanation for why Romantic art, literature, and music remain popular. In the two centuries since the Romantic Era, the world has continued to modernize. Cities have grown larger, technology has advanced at an unprecedented rate, and people’s lives have become much busier. The twentieth century world contains the aspects of Enlightenment society that the Romantics feared, and has them to a greater degree. If, then, Romanticism’s appeal lay in its emotional response to industrialization and modernization, that same appeal applies to individuals today and accounts for Romanticism’s continued popularity.

Caspar David Friedrich’s artwork indicates, however, that he believed Sehnsucht’s appeal was not only because it was a response to the dehumanizing aspects of the Enlightenment, but also because of what Christianity calls the general revelation of God. Friedrich saw a tie between Sehnsucht and Christianity, and he filled his artwork with religious symbolism to show that all creation conveys truth about God. He intended one of his earliest landscapes, The Tetschen Altarxv, to hang behind an altar in a church.xvi When Friedrich first revealed it to the public, however, it created such controversy that some called it heretical. xvii The Tetschen Altar received this review not because it portrayed anything that overtly contradicted church teaching—it merely displayed Jesus’ crucifixion on a beautiful mountain at sunset—but because it was the first to use a “secular” landscape in a religious setting. xviii

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Friedrich did not see his painting as secular piece, as the outraged church leaders did, but saw it as fully appropriate for a church setting. He did not seek to use the landscape to diminish Christianity but to “create a sense of devotion and mystery”xix and elevate the soul. He believed that landscapes belong in the church because their beauty reflects the glory of God seen in creation. To explain to the public his reasons for painting The Tetschen Altar, Friedrich went to the unusual length of publishing his own interpretation of it. He indicates that his painting is fitting for church use because it uses aspects of nature as symbols for Christian doctrine.

Jesus Christ, nailed to the cross, turns toward the setting sun, image of the eternal Father, giver of all life. With the teachings of Jesus, an old world died, the time when God the Father walked directly on earth. The sun went down and the earth could no longer grasp the departing light.

The Saviour on the cross shines in the gold of the sunset with the purest, noblest metal, and reflects the light onto the earth with a gentler gleam. The cross stands on a rock, as unshakeably firm as our faith in Jesus. Fir trees grow around the cross, evergreen and everlasting, like the hope of men in Him, Christ crucified.xx

The doctrine behind Friedrich’s assertion that nature reveals truth about God is the doctrine of general revelation. God reveals truth about himself not only through the Bible (termed special revelation), but also through the general revelation of all of creation. As the Westminster Confession of Faith says, “the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do…manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God.”xxi Romans 1:20 also says that, “[God’s] invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”xxii Christians hold that in the case of Romanticism, one of the ways that nature reveals truth about God is through Sehnsucht. Christianity teaches that death, pain, sickness, hard labor, and suffering presently plague “the whole creation,”xxiii and that in the future, God will create a perfect New Heaven and New Earth which are free from pain, suffering, and death, and in which all Christians will live for eternity.xxiv This is the same contrast between the present world and an ideal one that the Romantic artists sought to portray.

Moreover, just as the Romantic artists encouraged a longing for the ideal, so the Bible teaches that God causes people to long for the New Heaven and Earth, for he has “set eternity in the hearts of men.”xxv Thus, Christians see Sehnsucht as a feeling caused by the general revelation to all humanity of God’s goodness

and of his plan to create a perfect world in which Christians will live forever. According to Christian doctrine, then, when Friedrich or the other Romantic artists encourage the emotion of Sehnsucht, they appeal to the longing for heaven that God has given to all people. When viewed in the historical context of the Enlightenment, Christians see Sehnsucht’s rise as both a response to the dehumanizing aspects of modernization and a reflection of the longing for heaven that God has given all people.

Caspar David Friedrich’s beloved artwork, as with the work of the other artists, writers, and composers of the Romantic Era, recognizes that true beauty and perfection do not exist in this world and yet longs for the ideal. According to Christianity, this expressed longing is both a natural emotion and a normal human response to the dehumanization of the Enlightenment, for it reflects God’s beauty and perfection and anticipates his future restoration of creation to a perfect state. The Christian understanding of Sehnsucht as a natural feeling provides an explanation for the enduring relevance of the Romantic Era’s paintings, literature, and music.

It explains why Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog finds its way onto posters, onto the cover of the May 8, 1995 issue of Der Spiegel,xxvi and onto the covers of books;xxvii It explains why the Grimm Brother’s fairy tales remain popular; and it explains why Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies still stir people’s hearts.

Sehnsucht’s appeal is not only that many of the aspects of post-Enlightenment society remain to the present day, but that Sehnsucht is also an emotion common to all people.

The Tetschen Altar by Caspar David Friedrick, 1807

William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, 2nd ed. (Singapore: C. S. Graphics, 1994) 10. xiii.

Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner (New York: Continuum, 1990) 128. xiv.

Koerner 29. xv.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Tetschen Altar, 1807-8, Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Dresden. xvi.

Vaughan 7. xvii.

Vaughan 7. xviii.

Colin J. Bailey, “Religious Symbolism in Caspar David Friedrich,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 71.3 (1989) 7. xix.

Vaughan 8. xx.

Werner Hofmann, Caspar David Friedrich (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000) 275. xxi.

Westminster Confession of Faith, I, i. xxii.

Romans 1:20 (ESV). xxiii.

Romans 8:28 (ESV). See also Genesis 3:16-19. xxiv.

See Isaiah 11:6-10; Revelation 21:1-8. xxv.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV). xxvi.

Der Spiegel 8 May 1995. xxvii.

See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Dover Thrift Editions) (Mineola: Dover, 1994); Steven Lawson, Pillars of Grace (Harrisonburg: Reformation Trust, 2011). xii.

“Sehnsucht,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.

(1989). ii.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, Kunsthalle, Hamburg. iii.

Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Cemetery in the Snow, 1817-19, Formerly in Nationalgalerie, Berlin. iv.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, c. 18235, Kunsthalle, Hamburg. v.

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822, Nationalgalerie, Berlin. vi.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Dreamer, c. 1835, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. vii.

Caspar David Friedrich, Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, 1818-19, Stiftung Oskar Reinhart, Winterthur. viii.

Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd ed. (London: Reaktion, 2009) 29. ix.

Ibid. 29. x.

Ibid. 29. xi.

Leonard Bernstein, The Joy of Music (Pompton Plains: Amadeus, 2004) 29. i.

Nathaniel Schmucker ‘15 is from Wayne, PA. His major is undeclared.

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Recovering the METAPHYSICAL Character of Faith A Revival of Thomastic Epistemology

by Chris Hauser

I

n his poem The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost presents a picture of man standing in the clearing of a forest, stuck at a fork between two paths.

Deliberating between them, the narrator begins the poem by saying, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth.i

The narrator studies each option carefully, wishing he could travel down both roads without picking between them. Ultimately, however, he selects, “the one less traveled by,”ii and proceeds forward. The power of this poem lies in the effect of that choice, the effect of the decision to commit to one of the two roads; the significance of choosing and committing to one path determines the rest of the traveler’s life.

In many ways, the story of the development of our modern epistemology (i.e. what we believe we can know about the world) is the story of our refusal to leave Frost’s clearing. Faced with the choice between multiple paths of metaphysical and ontological beliefs

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(i.e. ways of understanding what reality is and what actually exists), we’ve figured out a way to avoid the whole drama of Frost’s traveler: just don’t commit to either path. Influential currents in modern epistemology encourage us to withhold commitment from “unprovable” beliefs and remain in the clearing: a neutral, objective, and detached space from which we can “rationally” evaluate all paths without entangling ourselves in their vagaries. It is this epistemology which underlies modern attacks on faith as an illegitimate mode of knowing truth; the truths of faith, known without “certainty,” are considered unrespectable alongside the “proven” truths of science.

This paper will argue that our modern understanding of epistemology essentially has its roots in a metaphysical error committed by the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes. To solve the problems created by modern, Cartesian epistemology, we need a restored Thomistic metaphysics. First, I will look at Descartes’ epistemology and the metaphysical mistake underlying it, and then I will examine Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics and the epistemology produced by it, demonstrating how it avoids the errors of Descartes and makes room for the knowledge acquired through faith.

René Desartes

by Balthasar Moncornet, 17th century

The Cartesian Manifestations

Worldview

and

Its

Modern

Before talking directly about Descartes, however, we must explore the background concept of deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning proceeds by way of a simple mechanism: one starts with initial, purportedly self-evident, intuitive premises—“first principles”— and reasons from these first principles to further conclusions. Now, Descartes’ skepticism is a sort of extreme and exclusive devotion to the method of deductive reasoning. Thus, in his Discourses on Method, Descartes asserts, in the words of modern philosopher Larry Arnhart, “that one can find truth only by sweeping aside all preconceived ideas, so that knowledge can be constructed step by step on firm foundations.”iii That is, he “begins by doubting every opinion,”iv an approach that has now been given the name “skepticism.” Descartes thus sets aside all knowledge and ideas, particularly knowledge and ideas produced by our experience as humans living in the world. Indeed, the appeal of this approach lies in a seemingly innocuous desire: Descartes wishes to gain a supposedly truer, more certain description of reality.

It is impossible, however, to doubt every opinion, for, as explained above, deductive reasoning depends upon first principles with which it must begin. Hence, in order to know anything at all, Descartes must provide something to start with, some unproven assumption or premise. Thus he introduced his first principle, what has now become a famous axiom: I think therefore

I am.v It is precisely here where Descartes really starts to separate himself from his predecessors, for he twists common sense around by supposing that it is not our being which enables our thinking but rather our thinking that enables our being; rationality, or “thinking,” has been made ontologically prior to being or existence.

Underlying this epistemic error is Descartes’ commitment to a metaphysics (a theory of what reality consists) that has come to be known as Cartesian dualism. Dualism is the metaphysical doctrine that there exists in the world both material things and spiritual things; the most common example of the latter is the soul or mind. It is contrasted with materialism (only material things) and idealism (only spiritual things).

There are, however, many different ways of understanding dualism. Cartesian dualism consists in a dualistic system in which mental-spiritual substances are divided from material-physical substances as two separate realms, thus in a way justifying the aforesaid ontological priority of thinking: since the mind can be said to be a mental-spiritual substance, it can preexist the material brain specifically and body generally. It is in his metaphysical commitment to the independence of the mind from the body that Descartes falls into the epistemological error of supposing that thought is prior to and independent of the body’s existence.

The combined result of these factors is an extremely mechanistic worldview. All human knowledge and thought, in order to be true knowledge, must be capable of being derived through deductive (that is, abstract and disembodied) reasoning from the first principle of I think therefore I am. Truth, reality, what is, has become equated with certainty. To put it another way, truth has been detached from its contextual setting, from its existence in the world, and become “timeless and fixed” instead of “historical and changeable.”vi Reality has become entirely logical since it can be reached via deductive reasoning from Descartes’ first principle, and hence it is predictable and mechanical: it can be controlled. One might say that Descartes has substituted a description of reality for reality itself: what matters is not what one experiences but the logical explanation of that experience.

Descartes’ epistemology, and the worldview it generated (which is in fact the prevailing worldview of many modern intellectuals), has left us with several problems. The human intellect has made good on the initial desire of Frost’s traveler to avoid commitment; the modern world gives preeminence to a detached, objective, third-person mode of inquiry. It is not hard to see how such a view proceeds directly from the mechanistic skepticism of Descartes. What is perhaps more interesting is the way in which modern scientism,

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the common assumption today that scientific knowledge is more certain and therefore superior to all other modes of knowledge, evolves out of this mechanistic skepticism. Scientism arises from a misappropriation of Descartes, applying his method of deductive certainty to science. Proponents of scientism take over Descartes’ view that scientific knowledge is obtained through objective, third-person, detached experimentation, and the application of Cartesian principles to science has fallen into a serious error.

Scientific experimentation proceeds by way of inductive reasoning, that is, from the observation of particular, contingent phenomena, rather than from deductive reasoning, and as such does not produce any kind of necessary, logical truth. However, in popular perception, this distinction has been lost—in part as a result of the tremendous technological achievements of modern science and its undeniably effective and powerful predictive accuracy. Thus scientism has elevated scientific knowledge to the highest pedestal of certainty and value. In other words, we have mistaken scientific knowledge, which considers for its subject particular and contingent phenomena and develops generalizations (theories) by idealizing such observations, as being prescriptive rather than descriptive. We think a chemical combustion reaction is what makes cars go, instead of thinking that chemical combustion describes how cars go. In this way, scientific “facts” quickly become elevated to equal status with metaphysical facts, sometimes even replacing the metaphysical fact: thus protons and electrons are thought to be just as real, if not more real, than apples and oranges.

Rightfully do we admire and value the predictive and explanatory power of scientific models, but we must not confuse explanations of what happens with the happening itself.

Descartes’ work has also lead to modern relativism and agnosticism, for it teaches us to regard nonscientific truths (such as truths about morality and God) as unknowable and ultimately unintelligible.

Indeed, a consequence of Descartes’ skepticism is that any knowledge or experience that is not explained by or does not follow from a mechanistic model does not merit the status of truth or reality but is rather a subjective sensory experience. Truth and reality are determined by certainty, and the non-mechanistic knowledge and experience of persons does not qualify as certain. Hence, anything outside the scientistic framework of reality must be doubted as uncertain and thus is ultimately unintelligible: one cannot possibly make a truth claim about such things which are unknowable by their very non-mechanistic nature.

Finally, Descartes ushered in modern materialism, the belief that all reality is material (no soul, no mind, no

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God): by positing his unique understanding of the soul as fundamentally unrelated to the body (by way of Cartesian dualism), Descartes introduced into our thinking, including much Christian thinking, an essentially insupportable idea of the soul that has tainted philosophical dualism ever since.

Problems with Cartesian Epistemology Since materialism, scientism, and relativism are popular positions in the academy today, many may not find Descartes’ legacy in these areas troubling.

There exists, however, another, crucial error produced

by Descartes’ philosophy that is obviously problematic, namely the artificiality of knowledge. It must be remembered that logically certain knowledge is an idealization or generalization of reality and thus is characterized by an intrinsic artificiality. Descartes himself admits, in Book II of his Discourses on Method, that he must ignore certain particular details and smooth over imperfections, “…even pretending there is an order among things which do not follow naturally a sequence relative to one another.”vii To put it in clearer terms, if the intelligibility of material things depends upon our ability to fit them into the mechanistic models of our deductive reasoning, then intelligibility is no longer an intrinsic quality of things. Intelligibility is rather something external, something which humans, by detaching themselves from their subjectivity and forming an “objective” perspective, apply to material things and thus incorporate such material things into a mechanistic model. Knowledge has become limited to only being about things; there is no knowledge of things. Instead of knowing an apple as apple, we limit knowledge of the metaphysical or real apple to a description: a red fruit round in shape that grows on a tree, etc. Moreover, not only are we faced with this epistemological limitation but also a further metaphysical limitation: having lost any kind of intrinsic intelligibility, things must also lose any kind of intrinsic meaning, nature, or purpose, a fact recognized and often lamented by modern existentialists.

A Solution: Replacing Cartesian Dualism with Hylomorphic Dualism Is it possible to avoid these conclusions? The solution, if it exists, must be looked for in the foundations, the underlying assumptions, at the heart of this modern worldview. We must return to the very origins of Descartes’ thinking and consider the error therein: the error of looking for certainty instead of truth, of letting epistemology determine metaphysics, of making the world conform to the mind rather than letting

the mind conform to the world. Thus it is in striking at the heart of Descartes’ commitment to his unique understanding of dualism that we can restore a sound epistemology. Concerning this error, the 20th century Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain writes, “In demanding from the outset, by an imposed postulate whose conditions have not been critically examined, that one should livingly put extramental being ‘out of bounds,’ the possibility is practically and by presupposition admitted of stopping thought short at a pure object-phenomenon, i.e. of thinking of being while refusing to think of it as being.”viii Here we can look to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Drawing from Aristotle, St. Thomas reinforced Christianity’s insistence on an intelligible extramental reality (Creation) by propagating a metaphysical system which has come to be known as hylomorphic dualism. Hylomorphism considers (physical) things as “composites of matter and form, and that in the case of a living thing, its soul is to be identified with the form of its body.”ix Thus Aristotle speaks of the vegetative souls of plants, the appetitive souls of animals, and the rational souls of humans. The hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas adds to this the assertion

about it. Under the metaphysics of Aquinas’ hylomorphic dualism, however, there are no such problems, for the extramental thing and mental object remain intimately connected via the intelligible form of the thing.

Responding to the various ways in which modern philosophers influenced by the dualism of Descartes have misunderstood the relationship of the extramental thing and the mental object, Maritain writes, Philosophical reflection has neither to reconstitute the thing apart from the object as a necessary hypothesis, nor to suppress the thing as a superfluous hypothesis, which is a contradiction in itself, but to affirm the fact that the thing is given with and by the object, and indeed that it is absurd to wish to separate them. On this point a truly critical critique of knowledge, one which is entirely faithful to the immediate stuff of reflective intuition, is in accord with commonsense in its apologia for the thing. In Thomist language, the thing is the ‘material object’ of the senses and the intellect, while what I have here called the object… is its ‘formal object’: both the material and the formal object being attained at once and indivisibility by the same perception.xii

Instead of I think therefore I am, St. Thomas’ first principle may be formulated as something akin to I am (therefore I think). that the human soul is uniquely, among the forms of material things, subsistent, implying that it is capable of existing after death in separation from the body.x In contrast, the central error of Descartes lies in his separation of thought from being. He can be said to have made the mistake of separating the extramental thing from the mental object, a separation made most clear in his substance dualism dividing mental-physical substances from material-physical substances: His [i.e. Descartes’] capital error was the separation of the object and the thing, in the belief that the object is inside thought…but like an imprint stamped on wax. Thereby the intentional function disappears, the known object becomes something belonging to thought, an imprint or portrait which is innate, and intellection stops at the idea (regarded as instrumental idea). This portrait-idea, idea-thing has for double a thing which resembles, but which is not itself attained to by the act of intellection.xi

It was precisely here that we noted the artificiality of knowledge under Descartes’ theory: since the mental object is merely a kind of “imprint” of the real thing, one can never come to knowledge of the thing but only

Thus Thomas’ superior understanding of dualism allows him to reject Descartes’ epistemological errors.

This alternative metaphysical foundation of epistemology can be perhaps mostly clearly expressed in a reversal of Descartes’ most famous axiom: instead of I think therefore I am, St. Thomas’ first principle may be formulated as something akin to I am (therefore I think).

To put it another way, Aquinas begins with the principle of non-contradiction: a thing cannot simultaneously be and not be. Unlike the first principle of skepticism, which begins with thought (properly speaking, a thought about thought or knowledge), Aquinas, influenced by Aristotle, begins with being: Aristotle “believed the mind was never directly aware of itself ” but that “rather, the mind was aware of itself only concomitantly through its direct awareness of external sensible things.”xiii Cartesian skepticism begins with a reflective thought about reality rather than the lived experience of reality. It is precisely here, moreover, that Thomistic epistemology avoids the aforementioned artificiality which characterizes the mechanistic world of Cartesian skepticism and all its modern reincarnations: Thomistic knowledge unabashedly begins with reality, with things, with what is, and is always seeking

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knowledge of things, even when producing knowledge about things.

Three Advantages of Aquinas’ Epistemology The epistemology that follows from Aquinas’ metaphysics has, at least, three distinct advantages. First, Aquinas gives immense prominence to the person and the personal act of his intellect. In his book Sources of Christian Ethics, Fr. Pinckaers writes that “knowledge, and the vision it brings, must be understood as happening at the heart of a personal relationship. It engages the entire person: the mind, where wisdom dwells; the will, which desires and love; the imagination, the sensibilities, even the body.”xiv Indeed, Aquinas conceives of knowledge as a kind of becoming, a conception intimately connected with the metaphysical priority he gives to being: unlike Descartes,

idealized and generalized theoretical apparatus of modern science with metaphysical reality or even replacing metaphysical reality with such physical causal theories, our epistemology delegitimizes the intimate, personal experience of metaphysical reality, rich through the inexhaustibility of its innumerable particular and contingent things in which Thomism argues knowledge reaches its perfection.

Third, Thomism distinguishes between perfect and imperfect knowledge rather than certain and uncertain knowledge. It is here that Thomistic epistemology, unlike Cartesian skepticism and its modern offspring, gives due deference to metaphysics, thus avoiding the modern slip of transforming truth into an epistemological concept rather than letting it be the metaphysical reality it is. When we speak of truth today, we often think of it as merely something which is known with certainty. However, within the Thomistic system,

At the heart of Thomistic epistemology lies a commitment, so innocuous as to amount to little more than common sense yet strangely absent in the skepticism of modern thinking: the unabashed commitment to the existence of things outside the mind. who thought of knowledge as a kind of picture of an extramental reality, Aquinas thought knowledge was something much more dynamic, consisting not of “the production of anything” but rather of a kind of “act of existence of super-eminent perfection.”xv To know “is, by an apparent scandal of the principle of identity, to be in a certain way another than what one is; it is to become another thing than oneself…to be or become another in so far as it is another…”xvi This rich, dynamic account of knowledge stands in stark contrast to the commonly accepted modern epistemology, an epistemology which privileges third person, objective, detached observation and encourages skepticism towards the reliability of personal experience.

Second, according to Aquinas, knowledge, beginning with the sensory input of lived experience, proceeds from the unity of a contingent, particular extramental thing (e.g. that specific apple) to the isolation of necessary, universal mental objects or essences (e.g. the concept of an apple, the concept of redness, etc.) before reaching its perfection in a return and “reintegration” into the integral and unified contingent, particular extramental thing (e.g. that specific apple as apple).xvii The erroneous thinking underlying modern scientism can be understood as cutting off the final “re-integration” stage of this process: by confusing the

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truth does not depend on our certain knowledge of it but rather simply represents the affirmation of metaphysical reality, of what is. Furthermore, instead of concerning itself with the purely epistemological question of certainty, Thomism emphasizes the question of perfection, a question of meaning rather than of method. Aquinas talks of knowledge as growing towards a perfect conformity with reality.

To see the significance of this difference, one can look at how it affects our conception of moral truth (what is right or wrong). This critical shift from the question of certainty to the question of perfection or conformity to truth makes possible a repudiation of moral relativism, for the flaw has been shifted from moral truth, denied as a result of its seeming uncertainty, to the moral subject, the person whose knowledge of moral truth is incomplete yet capable of progressing towards completion. It is in this way that we can recover the significance of personal conversion and moral development: in the skeptic system, there is no joy in gaining new knowledge, for the new knowledge is not achieved or discovered through personal effort but merely demonstrated and proven. In Aquinas’ system, however, new knowledge intimately involves the person and reflects a renewed alignment of oneself with the order of Creation.

extramental reality of the world and to let our theories and principles of knowledge “take their measure from things” rather than forcing them into artificial mechanistic models.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

by Carlo Crivelli, 1476

Robert Frost, Mountain Interval (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), Bartleby.com, 1999, 12 Feb. 2012, <www.bartleby.com/119/>. ii.

Ibid. iii.

Larry Arnhart, Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2003) 136. iv.

Ibid. 139. v.

Descartes also proposes a second first principle, namely the existence of God, but for the purposes of this article this latter first principle will be ignored.

Descartes actually derives this second principle from his own existence, given the first principle of I think therefore I am (Arnhart 138). Thus, treating the erroneous error of the initial first principal suffices. vi.

Ibid. It is important to clarify what I mean when I seem to indicate that truth is “changeable.” This is not to say that a truth changes but rather that things change and that the result of such constant change in things is that truth, insofar as it describes reality, changes, for reality has, so to speak, changed. vii.

Ibid. 140. viii.

Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938) 123. ix.

Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006) 246. x.

Ibid. 257. xi.

Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge 155. xii.

Ibid. 113. xiii.

Arnhart 148. xiv.

Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995) 11. xv.

Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge 137. xvi.

Ibid. 135-136. xvii.

Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent (New York: Random House, Inc., 1966) 17. xviii.

Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge 132. xix.

Ibid. 136. i.

In The Degrees of Knowledge, Jacques Maritain asserts that there is “an obscure and powerful teleological motivation…precisely not to be led to a certain end, to avoid a certain final conclusion”xviii which underlies all of Descartes’ thought and indeed all of modern skepticism: by admitting the possible non-reality of everything, one refuses to embark on the grand journey of metaphysical reality, of being. Like the traveler in Frost’s poem, one prefers the clearing of skepticism to the uncertainty of the life of faith and reason and reality. Maritain further writes, While an exclusively reflective philosophy [e.g.

Cartesianism] does not judge what is, but the idea of what is, and the idea of the idea, and the idea of the idea of the idea of what is, and all this with a tone of superiority because it has not stained its hands with the real or run the risk of its scraping the skin off them, the courage proper to natural philosophy as to metaphysics is to face these extramental realities, to turn its hand to things and judge of what is. And their rightful humility is to take their measure from things— which is what idealism will not do at any price.xix

At the heart of Thomistic epistemology lies a commitment, so innocuous as to amount to little more than common-sense yet strangely absent in the skepticism of modern thinking: the unabashed commitment to the existence of things outside the mind. Thus Maritain argues that Thomism is the only truly realistic philosophy, for it alone is willing to accept the

Chris Hauser ‘14 is from Barrington, IL. He is double majoring in Philosophy and History modified with Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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The Moral

GAP

This issue’s guest piece is an excerpt from a lecture given

by Professor John Hare of Yale Divinity School at Dartmouth on April 11, 2009. The remarks have been edited and updated by the author.

T

he moral demand is the first part of the structure of the moral gap. The second part is our natural capacities, those we were born with, and those capacities are not adequate to the demand. What I am presenting here is a version of the traditional doctrine of original sin, which is still to be found in Kant. His version goes back into the history of the pietist Lutheranism that he grew up in. It comes to Luther through Ockham and Scotus and behind Scotus, Anselm, and behind Anselm, Augustine. Duns Scotus was a Franciscan monk who lived at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth. He said that there are two basic affections of the will, if you like two pulls. There is the pull towards one’s own advantage, and the pull towards what is good in itself, independently of our happiness. We humans are born with, and will always experience both affections, even in heaven. But the key moral question is which we put first. For example, as I lecture here, I can be thinking first of the material and of you, my audience. Or I can be thinking first of myself, and my anxieties or satisfactions. I am in fact thinking of both, and there is nothing wrong with this; but the

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Dr. John Hare, Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School

key question is the ranking. When I am doing public presentations like this, my prayer beforehand is always that I focus less on myself and more on my subject matter and my audience. Do we put the good in itself first, and do what will make us happy only if it is consistent with this? Or do we put happiness first, and do what is good in itself only to the extent that it will make us happy? To think this second way is to be under the evil principle, which subordinates duty to happiness. And we are all born this way. Here I think the Ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, were right. What is natural to us is to pursue our own happiness. This means we cannot be impartially benevolent, for we put ourselves first. And this also means that we cannot make ourselves impartial. For the evil principle is our root principle, and if the root is corrupt the plant cannot mend itself.

My experience in talking about this view to people is that some of them think it is too pessimistic. They think, for example, that we are born basically good, and we do such horrible things to each other mostly because we do not understand what we are doing. But people can know perfectly well how much they are hurting each other, and do it anyway. My wife Terry used to volunteer at recess in an elementary school.

She noticed that these children, who had been together for several years, had established a pecking order, like chickens in a coop; and those at the bottom of this

hierarchy were bullied into a state of misery which, she thought, might leave serious psychological damage. My point is that the kids doing this damage knew precisely how to torment those beneath them. Or consider a dysfunctional marriage, in which the two partners have refined to an art form the techniques of wounding each other. In a perverse way, it is their ability to torment each other that keeps them together.

Even if we discount what you might think are extreme cases, think again about the movie, where the ticket costs enough to keep a child alive for a week.

There are some initial responses to this dilemma. Movies are an art form, and art has its own deep value.

But suppose it is Terminator VI? I need some relaxation, I might say, otherwise I will grow weary with well-doing, and burn out. But am I really on the verge of burnout when I go, and what about a walk in the woods? I need to spend time with my family, I may say, and indeed I think I can justify spending more resources on my own children. But is the movie really

used up in our relations to friends and family. The net result is to widen the gap with morality, not to reduce it. Sidgwick concluded that the only way to make our moral lives consistent with our pursuit of happiness was to bring in a god who desires the greatest total good of all sentient beings, and holds us accountable to this standard. Sidgwick recognized this as a return to the views of the original founders of utilitarianism, and he acknowledged this solution was both necessary and sufficient to remove the contradiction within ethics, and was ‘indispensable to the systematic coherence of out beliefs,’ but he did not commit himself one way or the other about whether this was good enough reason to believe it.

The most we can justify by enlightened self-interest is an ambivalent moral commitment, to be fairly good, at least when other people are looking. But morality requires, on the Kantian reading which I endorse, an unconditional commitment to an impartial point of view. But, to speak just for myself, I find myself switch-

What is natural to us is to pursue our own happiness. This means we cannot be impartially benevolent, for we put ourselves first. And this also means that we cannot make ourselves impartial. the best way to spend time with them? I think that after we have given all these sorts of reasons, we will realize that there is something unjust about the way we are spending our money. And this is not just the movie, but the new couch, the nice vacation, the down jacket.

Impartial benevolence turns out to make a demand on us that we limit our standard of living. And I think the demand is too high for us by our natural capacities. I was debating last week with Peter Singer at MIT. He and I agree both about the strenuousness of the moral demand, and about the tension with our natural inclinations. Singer is a utilitarian, believing that the right action is the one that promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He accepts the argument from the greatest of the utilitarians, Henry Sidgwick, that rationality gives us both aims, the egoist aim to be happy ourselves, and the moral aim to make other people happy from an impartial point of view, what he calls ‘the point of view of the universe’; and he accepts that these two aims are in tension with each other. You might think you could remove the tension by bringing in our sympathetic pleasures, the pleasures we get from seeing other people happy, and so from making other people happy. But the trouble is that our sympathies are limited in their scope. We feel them much more readily towards those close to us, and our caring gets all

ing off when the pictures of starving children come on, because I just cannot face it. Moreover our culture is full of devices to weaken any inclination we originally had. The retailers in the mall and the advertisers do not want us to think about justice while we are shopping.

In West Michigan, where I used to teach, the largest mall decided not to allow the Salvation Army to collect in their traditional way at Christmas time.

These two features of the gap-picture, namely the demand and our defective capacities, are present in Kant and have been repeated by most of the theorists of morality who followed Kant. A remarkable fact is that they have also repeated a third feature. They construct the picture of a person who is without our limitations of information and good will, and who tells us how to live. This imaginary being is given many different names and descriptions: an ideal observer, an archangel, a person ‘behind the veil of ignorance.’

What is typical of all these imaginary beings, however, is that they are without the usual human limitations.

This pattern needs explanation. Why should morality be presented as having this shape, rather than what we might otherwise have expected - a purely human institution, tied to our human conditions of limitation?

I think the overwhelmingly plausible answer is that these imaginary beings are a remnant, a relic. They are

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the remains of a traditional view, according to which human beings are subordinate to a divine being, who is without our limitations and whose prescriptions about our lives we are supposed to obey.

I do not want to limit the picture of the moral gap to Christianity, or even to the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There is already in Aristotle the description of a gap-shaped morality. The best life, he tells us, would be superior to the human level, but we ought not to follow the proverb writers, and ‘think human, since (we) are human, or think mortal, since (we) are mortal.’ Rather, as far as we can, we ought to be immortal, i.e. like the immortal gods. The gap picture, I think, goes beyond Western culture. I have taught three times now in China.

On one visit I went to visit the monastery where Chu Hsi lived and taught, a neo-Confucian of the twelfth century. He held that for most of us our good nature ‘is like a pearl lying in muddy water’, which means that we cannot see through to the right principles, whose source is heaven.

Now the description of life in this moral gap, without anything added to it, is incoherent. This is because of another feature of morality that can be expressed succinctly as the view that ‘ought’ implies ‘can.’ The best way to put this is that the question whether you ought to do something does not arise unless you can do it. To see the appeal of this principle, consider this example. When I was working for the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington, I took my infant daughter with me to visit the congressman who was head of the committee. She was too young to control her bladder, and had an accident that left a mark on the congressman’s blue carpet, sometimes I think the only lasting mark I and my family made in Washington. Now if I blamed her for this, it would not merely be stupid; it would go against the whole point of blaming. It is a cardinal principle of child-rearing that you should only hold children accountable to standards that they are able to reach. And another way to put that is to say that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. But then if our capacities are really inadequate to the moral demand, it is not the case that we ought to live by it. It is incoherent to put us under a demand we cannot reach. Yet surely we are under the moral demand. How are we to explain this paradox?

Christianity has a particular reading of the gap-picture of morality to help with this difficulty. The gappicture has three components: first, the demand, second our capacities, and third the person without our limitations who gives us the demand. What Christianity adds is that the third part of this picture (the person without our limitations, namely God) intervenes in human affairs so as to change the second part of this

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picture (namely our capacities) so that they become adequate to the first part of the picture (namely the moral demand). There is some evidence that belief in God does in fact change people’s lives. It has the power to reduce the rate of recidivism, or the likelihood of prisoners going back to prison after their release. It has the power over addiction in twelve-step programs.

There is a significant inverse correlation between religiosity (measured by performance of religious acts and presence of religious networks) and criminal activity, and a significant positive correlation with generosity in giving. You may say, less religious countries like some in Western Europe, let’s say Sweden, have lower rates of murder or teenage pregnancy than more-religious countries like the U.S. But there may be all sorts of reasons for this peculiar to each country. The more telling statistic is whether within each country those who are more religious live differently than those who are less. I think there is a growing consensus that the data tend to confirm a positive impact. But I should add that on the view I am defending, God’s assistance is provided not only to believers, though it may be easier for them to receive it, but to anyone trying to lead a morally good life.

It is true that religious motivation has also produced evil, for example flying airplanes into skyscrapers, or crusades. I do not want to minimize this. The desire to please God has produced in the last hundred years both great good and great evil. Perhaps the greatest evils have been produced by regimes like Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s and Pol Pot’s, that were outside the world’s great religions. But I do not have much confidence that we could calculate this correctly. Surely the truth of the matter is that human regimes bent on their own power can use any ideology for evil purposes. In general, the corruption of the best is the worst, and this corruption should not be held to the account of what has been corrupted. What we need is ethical constraint on the use of ideology, whether this is religious or not.

If you wake up in the middle of the night with the thought that God is asking you to kill your roommate, you should say, ‘That is not God telling me to do that’.

I think the main point of the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac is that God reveals through the story that it is not the divine will that we should demonstrate our devotion to God by killing our children.

You may say, ‘Using ethical principle as a constraint in this way shows that the appeal to religious motivation is redundant; we can simply operate with the ethical constraint.’ But this is a mistake. Constraints do not, in general, produce original motivation, but they function to limit its exercise. In the case of ethical constraints like the Golden Rule for example, they are internal to the faith which they constrain.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s

Introduction to Christianity

B

efore becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger penned Introduction to Christianity based on the belief that, “Every man must adopt some kind of attitude toward the realm of basic decisions, decisions that by their very nature, can only be made by belief.”i Ratzinger explains with brilliant eloquence the system of belief that Christians choose to accept, outlining the complexity of the basic components of the faith. Although the author is now the leader of the Roman Catholic Church as Pope, this particular work should appeal to all Christians and non-Christians alike who are seeking a deeper understanding of the truths of existence.

Cardinal Ratzinger begins his book with an analysis of the concept of belief itself. He argues that there can be no absolute certainty for the believer or for the non-believer. While believers, Christian or otherwise, may have doubts about their faith, non-believers may have doubts about their belief in no faith. He refers to the nagging “perhaps”ii that can plague both. To the believer, he sets a challenge: “Love is always mysterium—more than one can reckon or grasp by subsequent reckoning. Love itself—the uncreated, eternal God—must therefore be in the highest degree a mystery—the mysterium itself.”iii Instead of trying to convince the believer to outrun doubt, Ratzinger instead refers to uncertainty as a point of connection between those who believe in a higher power and those who do not. Referring to the presence of doubt, he poignantly writes, “There is no escape from the dilemma of being man.”iv Following his thoughts on belief, Benedict dives into Christian theology’s understanding of the nature of God. This includes a brilliant explanation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, a concept often difficult to grasp. His illuminating reflections pay respect to the history of the Faith with the understanding that “the enlargement of the bounds of human thinking necessary to absorb the Christian experience of God did not come of its own accord. It demanded a struggle in which every error was fruitful.”v Ratzinger challenges

Book Review by Elena Zinski

the reader to consider basic tenants of the Christian faith with a new level of intellectual awareness. He traces the growth of the Christian understanding of God, from the very idea of a higher power to the specific person of Jesus Christ and faith in the Triune God. One unique perspective offered by Cardinal Ratzinger in his writings is the necessity of personally connecting with an assertion of truth. “Truth as a mere perception, as mere idea, remains bereft of force; it only becomes man’s truth as a way that makes a claim upon him, that he can and must tread.”vi This powerful and highly intellectual work concerns itself with not only detached ideas of faith and religion but with the effect these truths must have on the believer. Ratzinger provides new insight on not only who God is but also on the nature of man because of his relation to God. A deeper understanding of God leads man, in Ratzinger’s observation, to an awareness of the inherent human dignity with which each person is endowed. Although this work is certainly filled with complex concepts, it faces the most basic foundations of faith, belief, and human existence with great respect and beauty. An enjoyable yet challenging read, Ratzinger’s book stretches the reader’s mind while seeking to illuminate the heart.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 2004) 71. ii Ibid. 46. iii Ibid. 162. iv Ibid. 45. v Ibid. 167. vi Ibid. 100. i

Elena Zinski ‘15 is from Wheaton Illinois. She is an Arabic major.

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Timothy Keller’s

Reason for God Book Review by Hannah Jung

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n his New York Times bestseller The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, Timothy Keller makes an intellectually cogent case for belief in God. Using support from literature, philosophy, history, theology, and his real-life conversations as the founding pastor of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Keller writes that not only is there insufficient evidence against the existence of God but also sufficient evidence for it. From the introduction, Keller sets the stage for his forthcoming arguments by inviting both believers and nonbelievers to take a second look at doubt and faith: “Even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning.”i In the first half of the book, “The Leap of Doubt,” Keller examines the seven most common objections to Christianity collected from his countless conversations with skeptics and then exposes the erroneous assumptions that underlie each of them. As an example, Keller unexpectedly reverses the problem of evil and suffering: he presents evil as evidence for the existence of God, taking the position of atheist-turned-Christian C.S. Lewis, who claims that suffering explains God’s existence and that the argument against God’s existence collapses precisely because of suffering.ii Keller questions, “[if ] natural selection depends on death,

Pastor Tim Keller, author of Reason for God

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destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak... On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?”iii Refusing to believe in God because He allows evil and suffering does not make the problem of evil and suffering easier to solve, nor does it disprove the existence of God. Throughout the first half of the book, Keller takes the reader doubt by doubt and ultimately reveals the ironic inconsistency that doubt in the existence of God is belief in the absence of God, calling this “an implicit religion.”iv As another example, Keller exposes the premise under the statement “miracles cannot happen” to be “there can’t be a God who does miracles.”v But if there is a God, there is nothing illogical about miracles, for God is exactly the one who can perform

Conversely, the belief that there is no God would only lead us to not expect meaning at all.

Keller anticipates the “so what?” objection—that although there are clues for the existence of God, no airtight proof can be made for us to know there is a God. However, Keller goes one step further and disagrees by presenting an unusual thesis: “you already know that God does exist.”x He draws a fine line between proving and knowing; Keller demonstrates that a world without God clashes with the world we believe in, where human rights are and must be respected. He poses a convincing proposition: “If a premise (‘There is no God’) leads to a conclusion you know isn’t true (‘Napalming babies is culturally relative’) then why not change the premise?”xi The dichotomy of a world conceived by our intellect and the real world where we

The Reason for God provides a solid and accessible case for faith from a believer’s encyclopedic research on doubt. them. Keller further points out that “to be sure miracles cannot occur you would have to be sure beyond a doubt that God didn’t exist” and that this is “an article of faith.”vi In the second half of the book, “The Reasons for Faith,” Keller presents arguments for the existence of God, offering them not as proofs but as clues, from the Big Bang (that there was a beginning indicates someone must have begun it) to the Fine-Tuning Argument (that the near-impossibility of constants all falling perfectly together by chance points to a universe created for humans by someone else). Keller also makes an analogy between the desire for meaning and the desire for eating when he inquires, “while hunger doesn’t prove that the particular meal desired will be procured, doesn’t the appetite for food in us mean that food exists?”vii In this sense, the human “hunger” for purpose implies the existence of something—someone— who provides meaning. Furthermore, Keller takes the clue-killer itself—evolutionary scientists’ thought that the belief in God remains in us only because it helped our ancestors survive—as a clue for God, calling this “a huge Achilles’ heel.”viii Keller challenges the doubtful reader: “If, as the evolutionary scientists say, what our brains tells us about morality, love, and beauty is not real—if it is merely a set of chemical reactions designed to pass on our genetic code—then so is what their brains tell them about the world. Then why should they trust them?”ix Finally, Keller expounds that if there is no God then we should not trust our cognitive faculties. The ultimate clue is that we do believe our cognitive faculties; if God exists there is a reason why our faculties are capable of finding meaning.

know God exists points to the reason for God: God must exist where human rights are to be respected.

The Reason for God provides a solid and accessible case for faith from a believer’s encyclopedic research on doubt. It dispels misconceptions and uncertainties about Christianity that challenge both believers and skeptics. Keller’s easily digestible style and thorough treatment serve as a helpful resource for the Christian and doubtful alike. To the Christian, Keller’s book provides easily communicable reasons for faith. To the skeptic, it brings to light the incongruence of the implicit beliefs that are likely underlying his doubts.

Timothy J. Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Riverhead, 2009) xvii. ii.

Ibid. 24. iii.

Ibid. iv.

Ibid. 16. v.

Ibid. 89. vi.

Ibid. 89-90. vii.

Ibid. 139. viii.

Ibid. 143. ix.

Ibid. 144. x.

Ibid. 147. xi.

Ibid. 162. i.

Hannah Jung ‘15 is from Seoul, South Korea. She is a Neuroscience and English double major.

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A Prayer for Dartmouth This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging outside Parkhurst Hall.

O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power. Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live. Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.

The Nicene Creed We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm that the Bible is inspired by God, that faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, and that God has called us to live by the moral principles of the New Testament. We also affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and the meaning of the word “catholic.”

We [I] believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We [I] believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

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Photo by Clarissa Li â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;15