Philosophy and Religion

From Plato to Postmodernism

M.J. Charlesworth

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781780744605
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

From the Greek philosophers to the Postmodernist theories of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, this authoritative survey encompasses over two thousand years of interaction between philosophical and religious thought. Exploring the various ways in which philosophy can relate to the monotheistic religions, Charlesworth follows a chronological pattern, considering both major and lesser-known philosophers.

1

PHILOSOPHY AS RELIGION

If our hearts have been fixed on the love of learning and true wisdom and we have
exercised that part of ourselves above all, we are surely bound to have immortal or
divine thoughts if we should grasp the truth; nor can we fail to possess immortality to
the highest degree that human nature admits.

PLATO, Timaeus

INTRODUCTION

In this work we will be mainly occupied with the philosophy of religion in the Western tradition and only incidentally with Eastern thought. This is, first, for the sake of convenience, for the study of Eastern religions would take us too far afield; and, second, because the philosophy of religion is a peculiar creation of Western thought and occurs, in a pure form at least, only within that tradition. There are, no doubt, some Eastern thinkers – Sankara and Ramanuja, for example – who are concerned to speculate about religious themes in a quasi-philosophical fashion; but it remains true that in Eastern thought generally philosophy is never really disengaged from religion in the explicit way in which it has been separated out within the Western tradition. Some may see this lack of differentiation as an advantage and as a mercy to be grateful for, while at the same time judging the distinction between philosophy and religion that began with the Greeks, and that has persisted in Western thought ever since, as some kind of unfortunate original sin or ‘fall’. However, unless philosophy or ‘pure reason’ is accorded some kind of autonomy or independence, then there cannot be a philosophy of religion. All that we will have, as in Eastern thought, is religious speculation, with a more or less philosophical colouring, where the final arbiter is religious revelation and faith and not pure reason.

However, if it is the Greeks who are the first to separate off philosophy from the popular mythical religious speculations of their time, they are also the first to attempt the invention of what one might call a philosophical religion – the construction of a religion out of philosophy which is intended to take the place of ‘mythical’ religion. Thus, for Plato and his later followers it is the task of philosophy to lead the sage to a supra-mundane vision and illumination; indeed, religion in this sense is the culmination of philosophy in that the end of philosophical wisdom is coterminous with the end of religion. In contrast with Eastern thought where philosophy is absorbed into religion, with the Greeks religion tends to be absorbed into philosophy, though philosophy itself suffers a change in the process. Here the task of philosophy is not to analyse religion as something already given, but rather to invent and constitute religion and, as it were, to serve the purpose of religion.

Since the Protestant Reformation, with its rejection of natural theology and its suspicion of the pretensions of philosophy with regard to religion, the very idea of a philosophical religion has come to be seen as almost self-contradictory for if religion is the invention of our unaided and ‘natural’ reason, it cannot by definition be religion. In Christianity there has always been a sharp distinction made between what we may discover by natural reason and what by supernatural religious faith – the latter going beyond and transcending philosophical reason. God’s revelation is precisely a disclosure or revealing, on God’s own initiative, of what cannot be known by pure reason alone. And with the Protestant tradition this disjunction between faith and reason, the natural and the supernatural, what we can know by our own efforts and what we are given to know by God’s gratuitous revelation or disclosure, is so understood that it comes to be taken as self-evident that there cannot be any commerce between philosophy and religion, let alone any identification of the two. So Karl Barth, for example, attacks the idea of natural theology because of its very nature it involves reducing religion to philosophy and so denaturing it. Again, it has been argued that commitment to a religious revelation involves that one cannot accept the possibility of any human judgement on this revelation, otherwise it would not be a religious revelation. We cannot expect a religious revelation to fit in with our ordinary canons of knowledge, for ‘everything that did fit in with these canons could be known ipso facto not to be revelation’.¹ In much the same vein Rudolf Bultmann argues that if we admit that we can have a ‘natural’ knowledge of God in the light of which we may judge the Christian view of God, then ‘we have given up our Christian belief from the start; for it would be given up by the admission that its authenticity could be decided from a standpoint outside itself’.²

Within this context, the mere idea of a philosophical religion is rejected out of hand in that it is alleged to involve a gross confusion between philosophy and religion. In such a conception of philosophical religion there can be no room for the dimension of the supernatural, or for revelation, or faith, or grace, and a religion which has no place for these concepts can scarcely be thought to be a religion at all.

Quite apart from these objections made from within the Christian or ‘supernaturalist’ conception of religion (and to that extent limited in their force and scope), there are other more general objections that seem to make the identification of philosophy and religion an impossible undertaking. For instance, the late-nineteenth-century French philosopher Édouard Le Roy criticises all philosophical or ‘intellectualistic’ forms of religion in that they make religion into a matter of speculative or theoretical assent and belief rather than of practical commitment. Le Roy, along with a good many other thinkers both ancient and modern, claims that it is of the essence of religion that it should provide a ‘way’ of life. Religion is of its very nature practical, and whatever theoretical content a religion may have is strictly subordinate to this practical purpose – the ‘conversion’ of our lives. This is, in fact, the great difference between religion and philosophy, for while the latter is concerned with speculation for speculation’s sake (philosophy is useless, as Aristotle remarked), religion is pre-eminently concerned with action and practice. For Le Roy, then, any religion that merely exacted speculative assent to a number of doctrinal propositions, or that consisted solely in philosophical contemplation, would precisely not be a religion, save in the most attenuated sense.³

There is another consequence of this philosophical or intellectualistic conception of religion, namely, that it leads to a kind of religious élitism or esotericism. For, as only the few intelligent or philosophically wise can assent to the truth of a philosophical system, if religion depends upon philosophy only a choice few will be able to be religious in the full sense, just as in Plato’s Republic only the philosophical élite can know what ‘the Good’ is and so be moral in the full sense, and just as for Aristotle only the fortunate few can be fully happy.⁴ In this view, ordinary non-philosophical people have to rest content with a lower-level morality and a lower-level religion. But, Le Roy claims, this once again demonstrates the impossibility of a philosophical religion, for if philosophy is incurably élitist or esoteric, religion cannot be so and still remain religion in the full sense. Religion is essentially popular or universalist, that is to say it must be within the reach of everyone, lettered and unlettered. It is not ‘relative to the variable degrees of intelligence and knowledge; it remains exactly the same for the scholar and the unlettered man, for the clever and the lowly, for the ages of high-civilisation and for races that are still barbarous’.⁵ There have, of course, been ventures in religious esotericism – Gnosticism in Christianity, Ibn Rushd’s ‘Two Truths’ doctrine in Islam, élitist forms of Buddhism – but it may be argued that these are very much exceptions that prove the rule, for these experiments have usually been rejected by the mainstream of religion and regarded as aberrations. To demonstrate that any form of religion implies, or leads to, this kind of philosopher’s religion is therefore in effect to question its validity as authentic religion.

There is a good deal of force in these objections against the idea of a philosophical religion and they are objections that weigh very much with us at the present time (heirs of the Reformation that we are) and that prevent us from viewing sympathetically the strain of philosophical theology we are about to consider. However, whatever the objections, it is a brute historical fact that there is a substantial and important tradition in Western thought which identifies philosophy with religion and which sees religion as the culmination or highest realisation of philosophy. We can, of course, simply deny that this represents genuine religion by insisting upon the sharp and irreducible distinction between the natural and supernatural, and by defining religion in terms of supernatural revelation, faith and grace – the gratuitous, unmerited intervention of God. Or again, we can define religion as practical in mode so that the notion of a philosophical or speculative religion becomes self-contradictory. But the ‘intellectualistic’ tradition is too large and central to be dismissed in this way,⁶ for it includes Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and the neo-Platonic school, including the sixth-century Christian Pseudo-Dionysius (who had such a large effect upon the thought of the Middle Ages). Again, it is manifested in the philosophical theology of certain of the great Moslem thinkers such as Ibn Rushd in the twelfth century and, in quite a different context, in the thought of Spinoza and the deists of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of Hegel in the nineteenth century. Even within the Christian tradition, at least up until the Reformation, there is a persistent inclination towards ‘intellectualism’, despite the theological condemnations of it as being destructive of the distinction between nature and the supernatural, faith and reason. This tendency can be traced in the early thought of St Augustine (354–430) for example, and certainly in Boëthius’s (480–524) De Consolatione Philosophiae. The De Consolatione had enormous influence upon subsequent Christian thought, and yet it is a work in which philosophy is seen as a way of life that culminates, without any kind of break, in religious enlightenment. Again, in the so-called ‘dialectical’ movement in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in the Christian West, there is this same tendency (though often ambiguously expressed) to identify ‘true philosophy’ with faith. It is indeed against this movement that in the early Middle Ages St Peter Damian and St Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, protest so violently, and the violence of their attacks on the religion of the philosophers or dialecticians bears witness to its reality and importance. Even such orthodox Christian thinkers as St Anselm of Bec have a strong dose of intellectualism in their theology, though in practice they make the necessary reservations and qualifications about supernatural faith being discontinuous with philosophical reason.⁷ Finally, contemporary with Aquinas in the thirteenth century there is the movement of ‘Latin Averroism’, which holds the philosophical life to be the highest state available to humans, and which is important enough to earn ecclesiastical condemnation.⁸ Aquinas’s mentor, St Albert the Great, had been deeply influenced by the eleventh-century Islamic thinker Ibn Sina (Avicenna) who had identified Aristotle’s conception of the life of philosophical contemplation with the prophetic life. It is interesting to note that Eckhart, in the thirteenth century, reformulated this idea in his doctrine of ‘radical detachment’, which leads to the mystical indwelling of God in the soul. As de Libera notes, Aristotle’s ideas were transformed into a doctrine about the mystical life.⁹

It is, therefore, very difficult to define away this conception of the philosophy of religion simply by claiming that, within the Judaeo-Christian context, it represents a kind of contradiction in terms. For this way of viewing the philosophy of religion has in reality been of very great moment in the history of Western thought. We shall, therefore, look critically at some typical essays that have been made in this kind of philosophy of religion. Once again, we shall not be concerned to present a complete history of this tendency in Western thought, but rather to understand its motivation, its logical structure, and its implications for both philosophy and religion.

PLATO’S PHILOSOPHICAL RELIGION

Plato’s philosophy of religion is elaborated by way of reaction against the mythological and superstitious character of the popular religion given credence by poets such as Homer and Hesiod, and supported by the priests and religious ‘professionals’. Plato argues that this kind of mythical religion lacks any rational basis in that no proofs or reasons are offered by its devotees for what they believe. Nor, again, does it give a true and adequate account of ‘the divine’, for the infantile stories of popular religion show the gods engaging in all kinds of morally dubious behaviour and as being subject to change and multiplicity.¹⁰ This view of the divine is childishly anthropomorphic and the first task of the philosopher is to demythologise the traditional theology and to replace it by a true, rationally based, theology. So Plato forbids the poets to speak of Zeus giving portions of good and evil to men, because he wants to make it clear that since God is good, he cannot be the cause of evil.¹¹ Again, he forbids the poets from talking about the various metamorphoses of the gods, for God is immaterial and cannot change; likewise he is truthful and cannot deceive us. Thus, as it has been put, ‘Plato’s religion … is above all based upon rational convictions, on intellectual beliefs, on truths’. Again, it has been said, ‘For Plato a life aimed at salvati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Philosophy as Religion
• 2 Philosophy as the Handmaid of Religion
• 3 Philosophy as Making Room for Faith
• 4 Philosophy as the Analysis of Religious Language
• 5 Philosophy as Postmodernist Critique of the Religious Domain
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index