Agnosticism and Rationalism
Chapter V: Agnosticism and Rationalism
Agnosticism
I. Agnosticism in General.
(A) Definition. Agnosticism is the system according to which human reason has knowledge only of phenomena; all beyond phenomena is unknowable. As Huxley, who coined the name, described it: “Agnosticism is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle… Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable” (Essays).
(B) Foundation of Agnosticism. Agnosticism is, at root, the denial of the ontological and transcendental value of the primary notions and principles of reason — the very value which, as shown in an earlier chapter, guides human reason to the knowledge of a transcendent Cause.
(C) Consequences of Agnosticism.
1. Negative Consequences. John Stuart Mill regarded the very existence of the external world as dubious. Herbert Spencer admitted the existence of an external world only on the strength of the resistance offered by bodies: the world, on his view, is symbolically knowable, but its real nature is not. Huxley himself, one of the ablest of this school, described the origin of his term thus: “When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither act nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain ‘gnosis’” (Collected Essays, and Science and Christian Tradition). Tennyson gives the same spirit poetic form in The Ancient Sage: “Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, / Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in… / For nothing worthy proving can be proven, / Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise, / Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, / And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.”
In religious philosophy this yields: the existence of God is unknowable; no possibility of miraculous intervention remains; and even if a Revelation existed, it could be no more than symbolic or metaphorical.
2. The Positive Consequence is that the religious sense, immanent in human nature, is itself the sole source of all religion, and that this sense is gradually evolved over time.
II. Empirical Agnosticism (Hume, Mill, Spencer, Huxley, Comte, Ribot, William James).
1° General Philosophy. On this view an idea — the idea of “dog,” for instance — is only a confused image of the imagination, to which a common name has been given: this is the teaching of extreme Nominalism, and led Condillac to infer that “a well-constituted science is nothing but a well-constructed language.” Ideas, on this basis, represent only sensible phenomena; judgment is merely the association of two images; and reasoning is only an empirical conclusion drawn from sensible images. Substance becomes merely a name for a collection of external phenomena bound together by some unknown law; personality is best defined as the consciousness of oneself as a succession of internal phenomena; and causality is merely the succession of antecedent and consequent, with no real influence flowing from the one to the other.
2° Religious Philosophy.
Negative Side. The First Cause is unknowable. Human notions have only a phenomenal value, and cannot be applied to God — if they are so applied, antinomies ensue, as in the four which appealed particularly to Spencer: (1) Divine simplicity and Divine consciousness are opposed, since consciousness implies a duality of subject and object; (2) Divine immutability and Divine liberty are incompatible, since a free act adds something contingent and mutable; (3) Infinite Power and Goodness seem opposed by the permission of evil; (4) infinite justice and infinite mercy cannot be reconciled. And every hypothesis concerning the nature of the Absolute — Atheism, Pantheism, Theism alike — is held to involve contradictions.
Answer. As already indicated, both Kant’s and Spencer’s antinomies result from ascribing human perfections to God in their univocal, rather than their analogous, sense — a confusion already exposed in the doctrine of analogy set out above. Miraculous intervention remains impossible on this system, and Revelation, if it existed, could only be symbolical and metaphorical.
Positive Side. The human spirit, on this view, acquires merely symbolic representations of the Unknowable, but these conceptions serve at least to awaken the religious sense. Herbert Spencer held that all forms of religion are struggles of the human spirit to represent the Absolute, in which the moral element gradually prevails over the merely propitiatory, until religion becomes an indefinite consciousness of the Absolute. Comte held that Science and Philosophy alone are not sufficient to preserve the social bond, and that religion is therefore useful, retaining certain Christian truths such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul — though in his system “God” is simply humanity itself, and immortality is only an impersonal survival in the memory of the living; the chief precept of this positivist religion, “the religion of humanity,” is vivre pour autrui, “live for others” (Altruism). Comte’s positivist trinity venerates the Great Being (humanity), the Great Temple (the earth), and the Great Medium (space). Ribot and others developed an empirical psychologism in which religious phenomena are the unconscious projection of human affections and desires toward an imagined object, admitting no real distinction between true and false mysticism — between, say, the mysticism of St. Teresa and that of Madame Guyon. William James held that the fundamental characteristic of religion is the spirit of prayer and confidence, by which man believes himself associated with a Supreme Being; dogma evolves later, and the value of religious experience is to be judged pragmatically, by its results — holiness, though sometimes immoderate, generally furthers a moral development which neither science nor sociology can achieve by themselves; dogmas cannot be proved, but are useful in overcoming egoism, and the existence of a personal God and of a particular Providence, though themselves unprovable, are, if useful, “practically true.”
III. Idealistic Agnosticism (Kant, Renouvier, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Sabatier, and others).
1° General Philosophy. Locke’s aphorism will be recalled — nihil est in intellectu, nisi prius fuerit in sensu, “nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses” — to which Leibniz replied, nisi ipse intellectus, “except the intellect itself.” Kant sided with Leibniz in holding that necessary truths do not come from experience. He distinguished an analytic judgment, which merely affirms an essential and obvious property already contained in a notion (“every triangle has three sides”), from a synthetic judgment, which declares the existence of an attribute not actually contained in the notion, but which the mind is led, by some form of evidence, to attribute to it. He further subdivided synthetic judgments into two kinds: the synthetic a posteriori, derived from experience (“all men are mortal”), and the synthetic a priori, whose justification lies in a mental category (“every substance has an efficient cause,” “every contingent being has a cause”). Kant’s categories — two for sensation, time and space; twelve for the understanding, gathered under the four heads of quantity, quality, relation, and modality; and three great generalisations of reason, the Soul, the Universe, and God — laid the foundation for a thoroughgoing subjectivism. The law of causality, on this view, is only a mental category applied to experience, and consequently has no objective value; yet the categories bind phenomena together and constitute a science of phenomena which is subjectively necessary and universal. Kant was right in his conclusion, though wrong in his premisses, that Empiricism must be rejected for its failure to explain the existence of necessary truths; but Catholic philosophy defends the existence of such truths, not on the ground of subjective categories, but because the mind sees their necessity and universality intuitively.
2° Religious Philosophy.
Negative Side. No speculative proof of the existence of God can be given, since primary principles such as causality have no ontological value; neither miracle nor revelation is possible; and dogmas cannot have a transcendental value, since they are expressed in terms of human ideas which are not themselves transcendental.
Positive Side. Practical reason affirms the existence of God by an act of natural faith, attaining to a certitude subjectively sufficient, though objectively insufficient, that God is a Rewarder who will crown virtue with happiness. The Trinity, on this view, signifies not three Persons but three attributes of God; the Incarnation is only the manifestation of a perfect moral life in one who was but a just man; the Redemption, wrought through the death of Christ, is only a sublime example of moral fortitude; original sin is nothing more than the conflict between spirit and flesh; and the Sacraments are mere symbols of moral ideas.
Kant’s philosophy is the source both of the agnosticism of many Liberal Protestants, such as Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack, and of the Modernists, such as Le Roy, Tyrrell, and Loisy.
(a) Liberal Protestants. Schleiermacher: “Revelation cannot be made credible by external signs; men are moved to faith by internal experience alone” (Der christliche Glaube). Ritschl: “Religion consists not in dogmas, but in our sentiments of faith, hope, and love towards God. Dogmas do not reveal God, but our sentiments towards Him” (Theologie und Metaphysik). Harnack: “Christianity is a higher form of natural religion… the essence of Christianity lies in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” (Dogmengeschichte). Auguste Sabatier: “Revelation is the progressive knowledge of God in the consciousness of each individual.” Knowledge of God, on his account, arises from internal emotion, from which springs prayer and adoration; from the emotion of fear comes the conception of Divine Justice, and from the emotion of love, the idea of Divine goodness and paternity. Dogmas thus symbolically represent these emotions and express religious experience: some doctrines — the Fatherhood of God, for instance — remain immutable, while others change, whether by desuetude (as belief in the eternity of punishment), by “intussusception,” or gradual development (as the doctrine of the Trinity), or by the renovation of an old formula with a new meaning, or the creation of an entirely new conception (as justification by faith) — see his Les Religions d’Autorité et la Religion de l’Esprit.
(b) The Modernists. Modernism was treated philosophically by E. Le Roy (Dogme et Critique), spiritually by Fr. Tyrrell (Christianity at the Cross-Roads, and elsewhere), and historically by the Abbé Loisy (Autour d’un Petit Livre, and elsewhere). Le Roy: “The existence of God cannot be proved, because the principle of causality is only a relation between phenomena. Religious experience gives assurance of God’s existence. A miracle is [merely] an effect of lively faith. Dogmas, from the speculative standpoint, cannot have a positive sense, because the ideas they express have no ontological or transcendent value; dogmas have [only] a negative sense, and, from the practical standpoint, a positive sense. For instance, ‘God is a Person’ means, negatively, that God is not corporeal nor a mere idea, and, positively, that one should act towards God as if He were a Person. The Resurrection of Christ signifies only His spiritual influence after death.” Tyrrell: “Religion is the internal experience of God’s presence and of His paternity. This experience is universal; hence revelation and faith are identical. The experience is expressed at first imaginatively — Christ is described by St. Peter as the Messiah, by St. Paul as the Second Adam, by St. John as the Word, by the first faithful as the Son of God. The experience is expressed later intellectually: the Council of Nicaea approved the formula ‘the Word, substantial with the Father.’ These formulas are not absolutely true. The Church has erred in regard to dogmatic formulas. The primary rule of faith is conscience. New ideas in religion are condemned at first, but adopted later.” In Germany, Schell taught that the authority of the Church must be accepted by the learned only with reservations. Loisy, the Modernist exegete, regarded the New Testament as a purely human document, and explained away all its supernatural features allegorically; the non-intervention of God in history is, for the Modernists, an unquestioned axiom. “L’historien,” writes Loisy, “n’a pas à s’inspirer de l’agnosticisme pour écarter Dieu de l’histoire; il ne l’y rencontre jamais” — “the historian need not draw his inspiration from agnosticism in order to exclude God from history; he never encounters Him there” (Simples Réflexions, p. 211) — a sentiment which stands as an axiom with Modernists no less than with the empiricists.
Against all this stands the warning of St. Paul: “For there shall be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine, but, according to their own desires, will heap up to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will turn away their hearing from the truth, and will be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. IV, 3).
Critique. The basic principle of Agnosticism — the denial of the ontological and transcendental value of the primary notions and principles of reason — has already been refuted in an earlier chapter. In England, Sensism and Hegelianism are both in decline, while Pragmatism, the outright negation of all philosophy, has a dubious following of its own, and there is a growing appreciation of the truth and cogency of Scholastic philosophy as interpreted by the luminous teaching of St. Thomas. It will be well to note briefly some of the chief difficulties which Agnosticism involves.
I. Against Empirical Agnosticism. (a) Intelligible notions — substance, causality, and the like — cannot be expressed in sensible images. The Empiricist regards substance as a mere collection of phenomena — an orange, to him, is only its colour, fragrance, weight, shape, taste, all bound together by some unknown law — and causality is treated as a mere succession of events, whereas causality properly imports the idea of an effective production of one thing by another. (b) The necessity and universality of first principles are not accounted for by empiricism: if the principle of causality, for example, is only a law of experience, its necessity and universality cannot be explained. (c) The conviction of the objective value of human judgments becomes an insoluble difficulty on this system, since illusion is only accidental, while this conviction is universal. (d) The illative value of syllogistic reasoning disappears for the Empiricist: John Stuart Mill’s well-known criticism of the syllogism — “All men are mortal; John is a man; therefore John is mortal” — held that the conclusion is already contained in the major premiss, so that the syllogism proves nothing new. In reply, it must be pointed out that the major proposition is itself universal, and therefore beyond the power of mere empiricism to formulate in the first place; and further, though individual instances are indeed implicitly contained in a general proposition, the explicit statement of an implicit truth is nonetheless a real gain in knowledge. (e) The very foundation of Induction — the derivation of a truth of universal application from particular instances — lies beyond the reach of empiricism, since Induction rests upon the necessary principle of Reason of Being: “the same cause, in the same circumstances, produces the same effect,” for otherwise any variation in the effect would be without a raison d’être; but since empiricism denies all necessary principles, Induction itself becomes impossible on its own terms. (f) The trustworthiness of memory is a truth necessarily accepted prior to all experience, and any attempt to prove the trustworthiness of memory must itself assume the very truth it seeks to prove; Mill himself handsomely acknowledged that the necessity of this assumption deals a destructive blow to empiricism.
II. Against Idealistic Agnosticism, three difficulties prove equally insoluble: (a) the universal conviction, held by mankind at large, of the objective validity of the primary notions and principles of reason; (b) the consequent necessity of recourse to “judgments synthetic a priori,” which, being neither wholly a priori nor wholly drawn from experience, remain, in the end, blind and unaccounted-for judgments; and (c) the sheer arbitrariness of the application of the Kantian categories themselves — for if, among a given set of phenomena, we are led to apply the category of Substance rather than that of Causality, the only possible reason is that our intellect actually apprehends substance, rather than causality, in those phenomena; and if so, the “subjective” category adds nothing, and is simply superfluous.
Rationalism
I. Definition of Rationalism. Rationalism is the teaching according to which human reason is the sole judge of what is true or false, of what is good or evil. Its essence lies in the claim that reason is wholly autonomous; hence there is, on this view, no need of supernatural truth, and nothing should be called true which is not evidently or demonstrably so. Historically, Rationalism is a direct development of the Lutheran principle of private judgment.
II. Foundation of Rationalism. Naturalism — the system which denies the very existence of a supernatural life and supernatural truth — is the foundation of Rationalism. Naturalism denies the possibility of any elevation of human nature to a supernatural order; Rationalism is simply the application of this doctrine to human reason, and Liberalism, in religion, is its application to the human will.
III. Consequences of Naturalism. From the standpoint of the intellect, Rationalism stands opposed to Christian Faith; from the standpoint of the will, Liberalism to Christian Obedience; from the standpoint of human sympathy and affection, Humanitarianism, or Altruism, to Christian Charity; from the standpoint of the lower faculties, Sensualism to Christian self-denial; and from the standpoint of collective humanity, Socialism to the Kingdom of God in society. The fruits of Naturalism — Rationalism, Liberalism, Humanitarianism, Sensualism, Socialism — thus stand each in direct and systematic opposition to the corresponding fruits of the Supernatural Order: Christian Faith, Christian Obedience, Christian Charity, Christian Self-denial, and the Kingdom of God in Society.
A few Catholic writers, the so-called Semi-Rationalists — Günther, Hermes, Frohschammer — attempted to reconcile Rationalism with Catholic Faith, holding that supernatural mysteries can, once revealed, be positively proved by unaided reason. A different, and equally unsuccessful, attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable was made by F. de Lamennais, who simply confounded supernatural Faith with the traditional faith of the human race at large.
IV. The Spirit of Rationalism. In rationalistic writings one may often find genuine commendation of sincerity in the investigation of truth, advocacy of the natural development of the religious sense, and even an admission of the truth of the Christian mysteries, if these are naturally reinterpreted. Without passing judgment on individual writers, the essential principle of the system itself remains impious: that human reason is so wholly independent that even God Himself cannot impose faith upon it. This is, at bottom, the spirit of infidelity and rebellion — the “pride of life” of which St. John speaks (1 John II, 16). Corruptio optimi pessima — “the corruption of the best is the worst” — and Rationalism is precisely the corruption of charity and of religious Faith under the guise of a broad-minded tolerance and a spurious reconciliation of all the varying forms of religious belief.
V. Different Forms of Rationalism. Some writers deny even the existence of the supernatural order outright — as does Pantheistic Evolution, whether in its materialistic form (Haeckel) or its idealistic form (Kant, Fichte, Hegel). Others admit that a supernatural order might exist, but deny its cognoscibility to us — the position of Kant and of the Agnostics generally. Others again, admitting both its existence and its cognoscibility in principle, deny God’s actual intervention in human affairs — the position, broadly, of the Liberal Protestants and Modernists, such as Sabatier and Ritschl. These three positions, taken together, exhaust the varying forms in which the single spirit of Rationalism has expressed itself.