Faith and Philosophy

The Historical Impact

D. G. Leahy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351754071
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2003. This work examines how Christian faith has historically impacted the notion of Nous or divine mind in Western thought up to and including the present. Christian faith is seen to have inaugurated an essential transformation over time of the ancient notion of divine mind and of thought in general. Beginning with an examination of Aristotle's notion of essence, Plato's creation myth in the "Timaeus", and Plotinus' "One", it is shown how faith in the hands of Augustine and Aquinas fundamentally reshaped Western thought and made possible in the modern period the radical subjectivity of Descartes brought to perfection by Kant and Hegel. The strenuous counter-thinking of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Levinas is closely compared to its disarming alternative, the thinking of Jefferson, Emerson and C.S. Peirce the father of American pragmatism.

Chapter 1

Creation Ex Nihilo and the Aristotelian Essence

What is the relationship between faith and reason—or, in the terms of Fides et Ratio,¹ what is “the relationship between revealed truth and philosophy?” What is the historical impact of revelation upon the truth of reason? Has faith actually altered the shape of reason in the course of time? If so, how has it done so?

In the Metaphysics,² Aristotle says [1029b] “the essence of each thing [ὅτι έστὶ τò τί ἦν εἶναι ἑχάστου] is that which it is said to be per se [ὃλέγεται χαθ’ αὑτό].” That which is said according to the thing itself is its what it was to be. Further [1030a], “the essence is an individual type [ὄπε

γάρ (τόδε) τί έστι τό τί ἦν εἶναι].” The essence or what it was to be is a [this] something. What it was to be is a this thing. Whatever is, insofar as it is, is something. Whatever is a what, insofar as it is a what, is what it was to be. There is nothing which is a this thing which is not its essence: a thing which is something is its what it was to be. The “this” belongs only to substances—that is, to primary beings. But something primary is something that is not predicated of another. Hence, says Aristotle [ibid.], “essence will belong to nothing except species of a genus, but to these only; for these are not predicated according to participation or affection, nor as an accident.” So, primary substances are species belonging to a genus. The species is said of a thing as what it was to be this thing. For Aristotle [1031b], each individual thing is “one and the same with its essence,” “to have knowledge of the individual is to have knowledge of its essence,” the thing and its essence are “identical.”³ The species or essence is said without qualification, or properly, only of an existing thing. It is an its it’s what it was to be. Essences or species exist only as substances of existing things. Essence is always an its it’s. Essence always is said of an it, essence is its, and, essence is always an it is, essence is always it’s. What it was to be is always it is its. The difference, rational, in the genus animal, is man, which in the category of substance is always this man. Man is the substance of this man.

W. D. Ross (Vol. II, p. 170), commenting on Aristotle’s text, says: “It might be said that a term like ‘man’, of which Aristotle thinks there is an essence, implies the predication of one term of another (‘rational’ or ‘animal’). Aristotle would reply that these are not ἄλλα [others] to one another since ‘rational’ exists only as an attribute of ‘animal’ and has no separate existence.” This answers the potential objection Ross is considering, but it calls one’s attention more importantly, and more precisely, to the fact that for Aristotle there is no rational mind which is not the actuality of a body with a potentiality to live. For Aristotle, not only has “rational” no existence apart from “animal” (which to Aristotle means “living being” in a sense which encompasses God), but more precisely “rational” has no separate existence whatsoever. Separately existing mind is not rational, it is perceptive, it is intellectual perception. There is no λόγος or reason apart from matter or potentiality. There is mind apart from matter and potentiality, but this mind or νοῦς is a divine something prior to all potentiality, including that of the human mind, existing as a cause of motion. What distinguishes it from other minds is not that its what it was to be is it is—which in Aristotle’s universe is true of everything that actually is—but rather the fact that its essence is to know, that is, to be identically what is known. The divine mind is for Aristotle [1072b] “the actuality of thought” which is life [ἡ γά

νοῦ ἐνέ

γεια ζωή, ἐϰείνος δε ή ἐνὲ

γεια]. The specific difference in the genus animal (the genus of living beings) which is the substance of divine mind is knowledge. Like all substantially existing species, the divine mind is the divine mind which this something is: “God is a living being, eternal, most good” [φαμὲν δή τὸν θεὸν εἶναι ζῷον αΐδιον ἄ

ιστον]. But, since the divine is what it is without potentiality, there is nothing for it but that the principle of individuation in the primary sense must be substance or essence or difference within a genus. The divine mind cannot be a species exhausting its genus, for in that case either it would not exist or universals would exist—as, for example, the Platonic ideas, which for Aristotle would necessitate an unacceptable infinite regress in genera. But then, the divine mind must be one of a number of divine minds within its genus.

Aristotle’s actual argument for the plurality of divine minds is based on physics, but the result of that argument is deeply consonant with the logic here outlined. The divine mind does not transcend the human mind infinitely, but generically, as a species of living immaterial being found everywhere in the natural world, including in the human soul, as a cause of one or another of the motions of that world, including one or another of the motions of the human mind.

But there is, as in every genus, a greatest of its kind. For Aristotle this greatest of the kind of immaterial living beings is the Prime Mover. Ultimately arguing from his analysis of the necessary properties of the physical world, he says [1071b]: “substances are the primary reality, and if they are all perishable, everything is perishable. But motion cannot be either generated or destroyed, for it always existed; nor can time, because there can be no priority or posteriority if there is no time.” Neither motion nor time can have had a beginning. The world of time and motion is eternal. But for Aristotle the preferred state is rest. Therefore, a cause for this eternal motion must be found. He thinks he sees that “there is something which is eternally moved with an unceasing and circular motion.” He thinks he sees this eternal motion to be that of the fixed stars, the “ultimate heaven,” which must be eternal. But then, since nothing moves without a cause, “there is also something which moves it. And since that which is moved while it moves is intermediate, there is something which moves without being moved; something eternal which is both substance and actuality.” That eternal substantial actuality must itself be, unlike the heaven which it moves, otherwise in no respect whatsoever. This unmoved and unchanging mover, which induces motion in the ultimate heaven, as a beloved in the lover, is necessarily an “existent, and, qua necessary, good, and in this sense a first principle.” The life of this being is like the best life that humans enjoy but for a short time—the life which is the activity of knowing [1072b]: “thought thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought by the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same” [αὑτὸν δὲ νοεῖ ὁ νοῦς ϰατὰ μετάληψιν τοῦ νοητοῦ. νοητòς γά

γίγνεται θιγγάνων ϰαί νοῶν, ὧστε ταύτόν νοῦς ϰαί νοητόν]. Here is the heart of Aristotle’s understanding of the actuality of knowing and being known. For man, the potential knower of all things, knowing occurs when it is identically the essence of the known. This act of knowing in which the knower and the known are identical is for a man a short fleeting experience of the divinity—indeed, of the more than human—in the human soul without which the human would not not simply be but would not actually be what it is or what it was to be. This divinity in the human soul is the conditio sine qua non of the humanity which it transcends. Thus, for reason to know the essence of something is always to know what it was to be that thing. Before and after the act of knowledge both the knower and the known are such potentially, not actually. Prior to the act of knowledge in which human reason transcends itself, reason is potential knowledge. Prior to the act of knowledge the things of the world are potentially known. Then in the act of knowledge the mutual potentiality of mind and thing is completely eliminated. Aristotle’s description of the act of knowledge which is the divine mind is framed on the analogy of sensation: the νοῦς prehends, grasps, the intelligible [ϰατὰ μετάληψιν τοῦ νοητοῦ], becoming identically the intelligible in seizing it [νοητὸς γὰ

γίγνεται θιγγάνων ϰαὶ νοῶν], just as sensing is identically the sensed in physical contact. The difference is that the contact of the divine mind with itself is eternal and immaterial; that is, without any reference to a before and after, without any reference to potentiality. The identity of the divine knower and divine known in this contact of the mind with itself has never not been: it is an identity never arrived at, never to be departed from. That Aristotle found it particularly appropriate to use the analogy to sensible contact in describing the eternal actuality of the divine knowing itself provides us an insight into how unintelligible Descartes’ doubt would have been to Aristotle: the latter cannot doubt the existence of a sensible world which is not actual apart from its being sensed by senses which themselves are not actual apart from the act of sensing in which that world is grasped. Christian faith in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist has not yet sown a seed of doubt concerning the actual identity of the substantiality of the sensible and its being sensed. For Aristotle the sensing of the world is the substantial actuality of the sensible world, in time before, in actuality beyond, all doubt and certainty.

Now, the life of the unmoved mover who moves the “ultimate heaven” is the best life in the genus of immaterial living beings. But this unmoved mover is the prime mover, not the only mover. Aristotle is a metaphysical polytheist who is proud of the fact that the Greek poetic tradition preserved—albeit in mythical form—the ancient wisdom concerning the plurality of deities. In effect, God is Zeus, the greatest of his kind, but nevertheless one of a kind. Aristotle argues as follows [1073a]: “Now since that which is moved must be moved by something, and the prime mover must be essentially immovable, and eternal motion must be excited by something eternal, and one motion by some one thing; and since we can see that besides the simple spatial motion of the universe (which we hold to be excited by the primary immovable substance) there are other spatial motions—those of the planets—which are eternal (because a body which moves in a circle is eternal and is never at rest—this has been proved in our physical treatises); then each of these spatial motions must also be excited by a substance which is essentially immovable and eternal. For the nature of the heavenly bodies is eternal, being a kind of substance; and that which moves is eternal and prior to the moved; and that which is prior to a substance must be a substance. It is therefore clear that there must be an equal number of substances, in nature eternal, essentially immovable, and without magnitude; for the reason already stated. Thus it is clear that the movers are substances, and that one of them is first and another second and so on in the same order as the spatial motions of the heavenly bodies.”

When Aristotle again turns his attention to the nature of the mind that is the prime mover of the universe, he rules out the notion that such a mind actually knows nothing as beneath its dignity, as if it might be like a sleeping man. But, again, neither can it actually know something other than itself because [1074b] “if it knows, but something else determines its knowing, then since that which is its essence is not actually knowing but potentiality, it cannot be the best reality; because it derives its excellence from the act of knowing. Again, whether its essence is mind or the act of knowing, what does it know? It must know either itself or something else; and if something else, then it must know either the same thing always, or different things at different times. Then does it make any difference, or not, whether it knows that which is good or knows at random? Surely it would be absurd for it to think about some subjects. Clearly, then, it knows that which is most divine and estimable, and does not change; for the change would be for the worse, and anything of this kind would immediately imply some sort of motion. Therefore if mind is not the act of knowing but a potentiality, (a) it is reasonable to suppose that the continuity of its knowing is laborious; (b) clearly there must be something else which is more excellent than mind; i.e. the object of intellection; for both knowing and the act of knowing will belong even to one knowing the worst thing. Therefore if this is to be avoided (as it is, since it is better not to see some things than to see them), knowing cannot be the supreme good. Therefore mind knows itself, if it is that which is best; and the act of knowing is the act of knowing of the act of knowing [ϰαὶ ἔστιν ἡ νόησις νοήσεως νόησις].” The divine mind knows itself in an eternal act of knowledge in which the knower and known are identical. It is the greatest eternal mind of its kind with reference to which all other minds and the motions of the universe are intelligibly ordered. It is a divinity of the greatest sublimity whose essence eternally orders a coeternal universe of metaphysical and physical beings.

Between Aristotle and Augustine intervenes neoplatonism. Hegel, with some impatience, describes Aristotle’s thought as never able to get beyond particularity to arrive at comprehensive speculative unity. In this respect Aristotle’s thought was unsatisfying to Hegel.⁴ But long before Hegel it was unsatisfying also to the third-century neoplatonist, Plotinus. Plotinus unified the otherwise radically particularized Aristotelian ontology by deriving that being-scape immediately from his version of the Platonic “idea of the Good,” which in the Republic is beyond both being and truth. In Plotinus the divine mind [ὁ νοῦς] emanates from an infinitely exalted Unity or One [εν], comes as a Second from the source of all ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Creation Ex Nihilo and the Aristotelian Essence
• Chapter 2 Descartes and the Image of God
• Chapter 3 Kant, Hegel, and the Proof of God
• Chapter 4 Kierkegaard and the Absurdity of Faith
• Chapter 5 Jefferson, Emerson, and the Incarnate Word
• Chapter 6 Nietzsche, Levinas, and the Death of God
• Chapter 7 The Logic of Faith, or, Beyond Modernity
• Appendix Thinking in the Third Millennium: Looking Without the Looking Glass
• Index