Escape from Reason

Francis A. Schaeffer

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830898299
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

Truth used to be based on reason. No more. What we feel is now the truest source of reality. Despite our obsession with the emotive and the experiential, we still face anxiety, despair, and purposelessness. How did we get here? And where do we find a remedy? In this modern classic, Francis A. Schaeffer traces trends in twentieth-century thought and unpacks how key ideas have shaped our society. Wide-ranging in his analysis, Schaeffer examines philosophy, science, art and popular culture to identify dualism, fragmentation and the decline of reason. Schaeffer's work takes on a newfound relevance today in his prescient anticipation of the contemporary postmodern ethos. His critique demonstrates Christianity's promise for a new century, one in as much need as ever of purpose and hope.

1

NATURE AND GRACE

The origin of modern man could be traced back to several periods. But I would begin with the teaching of a man who changed the world in a very real way. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) opened the way for the discussion of what is usually called “nature and grace.” They may be set out diagrammatically like this:

GRACE

NATURE

This diagram may be amplified as follows, to show what is included on the two different levels:

GRACE, THE HIGHER:	GOD THE CREATOR; HEAVEN AND HEAVENLY THINGS; THE UNSEEN AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE EARTH; MAN’S SOUL; UNITY
NATURE, THE LOWER:	THE CREATED; EARTH AND EARTHLY THINGS; THE VISIBLE AND WHAT NATURE AND MAN DO ON EARTH; MAN’S BODY; DIVERSITY

Up to this time, man’s thought-forms had been Byzantine. The heavenly things were all-important and were so holy that they were not pictured realistically. For instance, Mary and Christ were never portrayed realistically. Only symbols were portrayed. So if you look up at one of the later Byzantine mosaics in the baptistery at Florence, for example, it is not a picture of Mary that you see, but a symbol representing Mary.

On the other hand, simple nature—trees and mountains—held no interest for the artist, except as part of the world to be lived in. Mountain climbing, for instance, simply had no appeal as something to be done for its own sake. As we shall see, mountain climbing as such really began with the new interest in nature. So prior to Thomas Aquinas there was an overwhelming emphasis on the heavenly things, very far off and very holy, pictured only as symbols, with little interest in nature itself. With the coming of Aquinas we have the real birth of the humanistic Renaissance.

Aquinas’s view of nature and grace did not involve a complete discontinuity between the two, for he did have a concept of unity between them. From Aquinas’s day on, for many years, there was a constant struggle for a unity of nature and grace and a hope that rationality would say something about both.

There were some very good things that resulted from the birth of Renaissance thought. In particular, nature received a more proper place. From a biblical viewpoint nature is important because it has been created by God and is not to be despised. The things of the body are not to be despised when compared with the soul. The things of beauty are important. Sexual things are not evil of themselves. All these things are involved in the fact that in nature God has given us a good gift, and the man who regards them with contempt is really despising God’s creation. As such he is despising, in a sense, God himself, for he has contempt for what God has made.

AQUINAS AND THE AUTONOMOUS

At the same time, we are now able to see the significance of the diagram of nature and grace in a different way. While there were some good results from giving nature a better place, it also opened the way for much that was destructive, as we shall see. In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm man was now independent, autonomous.

This sphere of the autonomous in Aquinas takes on various forms. One result, for example, was the development of natural theology. In this view, natural theology is a theology that could be pursued independently from the Scriptures. Though it was an autonomous study, he hoped for unity and said that there was a correlation between natural theology and the Scriptures. But the important point in what followed was that a really autonomous area was set up.

From the basis of this autonomous principle, philosophy also became free and was separated from revelation. Therefore philosophy began to take wings, as it were, and fly off wherever it wished, without relationship to the Scriptures. This does not mean that this tendency was never previously apparent, but it appears in a more total way from this time on.

Nor did it remain isolated in Thomas Aquinas’s philosophic theology. Soon it began to enter the arts.

Today we have a weakness in our educational process in failing to understand the natural associations between the disciplines. We tend to study all our disciplines in unrelated parallel lines. This tends to be true in both Christian and secular education. This is one of the reasons why evangelical Christians have been taken by surprise at the tremendous shift that has come in our generation. We have studied our exegesis as exegesis, our theology as theology, our philosophy as philosophy; we study something about art as art; we study music as music, without understanding that these are things of man, and the things of man are not unrelated parallel lines.

There are several ways in which this association between theology, philosophy and the arts emerged following Aquinas.

PAINTERS AND WRITERS

The first artist to be influenced was Cimabue (1240-1302), teacher of Giotto (1267-1337). Aquinas lived from 1225 to 1274, thus these influences were clearly felt quickly in the field of art. Instead of all the subjects of art being above the dividing line between nature and grace in the symbolic manner of the Byzantine, Cimabue and Giotto began to paint the things of nature as nature. In this transition period the change did not come all at once. Hence there was a tendency at first to paint the lesser things in the picture naturalistically, but to continue to portray Mary, for example, as a symbol.

Then Dante (1265-1321) began to write in the way that these men painted. Suddenly, everything starts to shift on the basis that nature began to be important. The same development can be seen in the writers Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375). Petrarch was the first man we hear of who ever climbed a mountain just for the sake of climbing a mountain. This interest in nature as God made it is, as we have seen, good and proper. But Aquinas had opened the way to an autonomous Humanism, an autonomous philosophy, and once the movement gained momentum, there was soon a flood.

NATURE VERSUS GRACE

The vital principle to notice is that, as nature was made autonomous, nature began to “eat up” grace. Through the Renaissance, from the time of Dante to Michelangelo, nature became gradually more totally autonomous. It was set free from God as the humanistic philosophers began to operate ever more freely. By the time the Renaissance reached its climax, nature had eaten up grace.

This can be demonstrated in various ways. We will begin with a miniature entitled Grandes Heures de Rohan painted about 1415. The story it portrays is a miracle story of the period. Mary and Joseph and the baby, fleeing into Egypt, pass by a field where a man is sowing seed, and a miracle happens. The grain grows up within an hour or so and is ready for harvesting. When the man goes to harvest it, pursuing soldiers come by and ask, “How long ago did they pass by?” He replies that they passed when he was sowing the seed and so the soldiers turn back. However, it is not the story that interests us but rather the way in which the miniature is laid out. First of all, there is a great difference in the size of the figures of Mary and Joseph, the baby, a servant and the donkey which are at the top of the picture and which dominate it by their size, and the very small figures of the soldier and the man wielding the sickle at the bottom of the picture. Second, the message is made clear, not only by the size of the upper figures, but also by the fact that the background of the upper part of the miniature is covered with gold lines. Hence there is a total pictorial representation of nature and grace.

This is the older concept, with grace overwhelmingly important, and nature having little place.

In Northern Europe Van Eyck (1380-1441) was the one who opened the door for nature in a new way. He began to paint real nature. In 1410, a very important date in the history of art, he produced a tiny miniature. It measures only about five inches by three inches. But it is a painting with tremendous significance because it contains the first real landscape. It gave birth to every background that came later during the Renaissance. The theme is Jesus’ baptism, but this takes up only a small section of the area. There is a river in the background, a very real castle, houses, hills and so on—this is a real landscape; nature has become important. After this, such landscapes spread rapidly from the north to the south of Europe.

Soon we have the next stage. In 1435, Van Eyck painted the Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin—now in the Louvre in Paris. The significant feature is that Chancellor Rolin, facing Mary, is the same size as she is. Mary is no longer remote, the Chancellor no longer a small figure, as would have been the case with the donors at an earlier period. Though he holds his hands in an attitude of prayer, he has become equal with Mary. From now on the pressure is on: how is this balance between nature and grace to be resolved?

Another man of importance, Masaccio (1401-1428), should be mentioned at this point. He makes the next big step in Italy after Giotto, who died in 1337, by introducing true perspective and true space. For the first time, light comes from the right direction. For example, in the marvelous Carmine Chapel in Florence, there is a window which he took into account as he painted his pictures on the walls, so that the shadows in the paintings fall properly in relation to the light from this window. Masaccio was painting true nature. He painted so that his pictures looked as though they were “in the round”; they give a feeling of atmosphere; and he has introduced real composition. He lived only until he was twenty-seven, yet he opened almost the entire door to nature. With Masaccio’s work, as with much of Van Eyck’s, the emphasis on nature was such as could have led to painting with a true biblical viewpoint.

Coming on to Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), it is apparent that nature begins to “eat up” grace in a more serious way than with Van Eyck’s Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin. It was only a very few years before that artists would never have considered painting Mary in a natural way at all—they would paint only a symbol of her. B...