Faith, Reason and Education
(Robert R. Reilly, February 9, 2021)
“What spectacle can be more edifying,” James Madison wrote in 1822, “than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?” It was long and widely understood in America that a certain kind of education is essential to the maintenance of a free society. It is less well understood today, and we are seeing the consequences. Robert R. Reilly, director of the Westminster Institute, spoke at Hillsdale College on faith, reason, and education.
For more information on Hillsdale College CCAs, visit https://www.hillsdale.edu/educational-outreach/center-for-constructive-alternatives/
Transcript
Introduction
Hello, I am Robert Reilly, the director of the Westminster Institute. Today we are going to do something a little different. We are going to present to you something that the Westminster Institute did not produce but which Hillsdale College and its president Dr. Larry Arnn has given us permission to use, and that is a talk I gave a while ago on the subject of faith and reason, or reason and revelation, in education, so I am very grateful to Hillsdale and to Larry for giving us permission to use it.
Now, how this happened is I sent the video to the founding chairman of the Westminster Institute, Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, whom I have known for many years, who is a resident of England, whose own scholarship has focused on the subject of Islam, about which he has written more than two dozen books. He is considered one of the world experts. He thought that this talk touched upon some essentially important issues at the heart of Western civilization, and he was very happy when I told him that Larry Arnn gave us permission to use the video for Westminster, so we are about to do that.
About Larry Arnn
I should say a few words, by the way, about Larry Arnn, who is a personal friend of many years. That began many years ago when Larry and I were both graduate students at the Claremont Graduate School. He, of course, has gone on to be the director/president of the Claremont Institute and then for many years now the president of Hillsdale College, which he has directed to just some singular accomplishments, not only in the increase of the quality of the education that Hillsdale offers but in the additional programs, the additional sources for education, that Hillsdale makes available to secondary schools, to other professors. They offer courses online that have gone out to hundreds of thousands of people, and he has a monthly publication called Imprimis, which I believe now has reached a circulation of more than 3 million.
His leadership and his own scholarship are truly impressive. During Larry’s graduate period, he went over to England, and he became an assistant to Martin Gilbert, one of the most famous modern British historians, most notable for his work, his official work, on the multi-volume Winston Churchill biographies. Larry himself became a Churchill scholar and produced the book Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government, Larry Arnn. I highly recommend this to you.
I am also briefly going to mention a few of Larry’s other books. He is the author of Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education and The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It, just several of the works by this very fine scholar. And also, I want to acknowledge another wonderful favor that Larry did for me, and that is write the forward to my last book, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding.
I do not think there is a more effective defender of the founding in the United States than Larry himself, so that he had agreed to write the forward to my book was a really singular act of friendship and also displays his own profundity as it relates to these issues. It is a very, very thoughtful forward. I would not recommend buying many books just for the forward, but this is one of them that you could. So without further ado, let us turn to the program done several years ago in the winter at the campus of Hillsdale College in Michigan on my talk on the relationship between reason and revelation in education.
Presentation at Hillsdale College
Well, I want to thank Doug Jeffrey and Matt Bell, Kim Ellsworth for all the work she did on the arrangements, and most of all, of course, I wanted to thank Larry Arnn, my former classmate at Claremont Graduate University. He stipulated that my appearance here was only on condition that I not tell any stories from graduate school when this kid from Arkansas arrived with, well, a little hay in his hair, so I will keep that promise, Larry, wherever you are. By the way, I was very pleased when Larry mentioned the book America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, preface by Larry Arnn. Larry told me at dinner how irritated he was that some people have come up to him and said, do you know Bob Reilly? And he says no, Bob Reilly knows me.
Well, here we go.
I am afraid this is a very serious subject that requires some ponderous thought, and I was trying on the flight up here today from Washington, D.C. to try to cut out some things, but if I go for too long and cut into the Q&A period, Matt has promised that he will get the hook and keep me quiet. So our topic is faith, reason, and education. I will concentrate on the relationship between faith and reason, which one would need a very good education to explore and to understand properly.
The very differentiation of faith and reason is something of a relatively recent provenance and is uniquely Western. Ancient tribal man would not have understood the distinction. It was born of the contact between Greek philosophy and Christianity. Only that encounter, or collision if you will, generated the concepts and faith and reason as two distinct realms. Tertullian famously asked, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? This question has reverberated down the centuries.
Nearer to our own time, the great political philosopher Leo Strauss said that these two cities, the one representing philosophy and the other divine revelation, each made their own comprehensive claim to understanding what completes man according to what is highest in him. He suggested that these claims are antithetical to each other, but that neither can be disproven. Moreover, he said that the unresolved tension between these two cities was fructifying. It is what animated Western civilization and made its great achievements possible.
Eric Vogelin thought that the unresolved tension was not between these two cities, but between imminence and transcendence, and that reason was just as much a form of revelation as revelation itself. These are two possible answers to Tertullian’s question. There is not sufficient time to discuss them in relation to Islam or Judaism but let us consider these questions in regard to Christianity.
Are faith and reason headed forever for a head-on collision with each other, or are they actually in separate but parallel lanes headed in the same direction toward a final destination in the highest truth? Do they have nothing to say to each other, or can each be understood better in light of the other? Do those who say faith has nothing to do with reason ignore what faith itself says of reason? And is not reason ineluctably drawn to judge whether the content of faith itself is reasonable? Does it have the competence to do that?
These are the issues I want to touch upon this evening. There has been a lot of ink, and some blood, spilled over these questions. Henry Cardinal Manning in the 19th century said, “All human conflict is ultimately theological.” Does this mean that people with different theologies must kill each other? For extended periods of history, the answer was yes, my God will defeat your God on the field of battle.
It was often thought that no society or political order could cohere unless it was religiously homogeneous. This is sometimes referred to as the theological political problem. That it need not be so has been demonstrated by the achievement of the United States. In any case, the answers to these questions will affect the conduct of our lives because they concern the nature of reality, our ways of knowing it, and the truth of things, including the purpose of our lives. Of course, the answers will depend on the content of what reason reveals and on what revelation discloses.
I will touch upon the respective contributions of these cities in suggesting in what way they illuminate each other. I will also try to sketch out the consequences of the position that they are completely bifurcated and antagonistic. How was the authority of reason established in the first place? Upon what grounds did Athens claim that the world is intelligible to our reason? What makes it apprehensible? How could Greek philosophy claim the aptitude to know the answers to these things? From where did this confidence come that reason is a better guide to reality than, say, the divination of animal entrails by the high priest?
Some claim it was Heraclitus who first grasped that the universe is an intelligible whole, and that therefore man is able to apprehend its order. How can man do this, and in what terms can it be articulated? Heraclitus said the universe is intelligible because it is ruled by, and is the product of, thought or wisdom, giving it an intrinsic rationality.
As far as we know, Heraclitus and Parmenides were the first to use the word logos to name this wisdom. Logos means reason or word in Greek. Heraclitus meant that all things are animated by a rational principle. He stated that, “All things come to pass in accordance with this logos.” If this is true, then reason’s inquiry into the nature of reality becomes possible. The very idea of nature becomes possible. Heraclitus said, “It is the highest virtue and true wisdom in speaking and acting to obey nature that is the common logos. Therefore, all human laws are nourished by this original divine law.”
It is logos that makes the world intelligible to the endeavor of philosophy, and it is why laws in turn must be reasonable. As Socrates later said, “The world is the product of a mind which sets everything in order and produces each individual thing in the way that is best for it.” We can have thoughts about things that are the product of thought. We can also have thoughts about the thinker, leading Aristotle to describe God as thought thinking itself. The maker is reflected in the things he made, since they are not made accidentally but according to logos.
Through reason, said Socrates, man can know what is. Now, Aristotle said that what is operates according to the laws of nature. He taught that the essence or nature of a thing is what makes it what it is and why it is not and cannot be something else. In the politics he said that the nature of things consists in their end or consummation. I am quoting from him now, “for what each thing is when its growth is completed, we call the nature of that thing, whether it be a man or a horse or a family.”
For example, an acorn develops into an oak tree. There is no point along its trajectory of growth that it will turn into something other than an oak. That is because it has the nature of an oak tree and not of anything else. It is inwardly directed to be an oak tree, hence by nature a natural law. Aristotle meant the principle of development which makes any living thing what it is and given the proper conditions what it will become when it reaches its perfection or fulfillment. For Aristotle, “Nature ever seeks an end.” He declared, “Nature does nothing without purpose or uselessly.”
This end state is its Telos, the reason for which it is. The telos of the acorn is a fully mature oak tree. Philosopher Robert Sokolowski said, “The end of a thing is its perfection. The nature is what is perfected. The nature and end of a thing are normative for that thing. The end in particular is how the thing should be.” The natural law for each thing is what allows us to speak of what it ought to be.
This means that what is good for a thing are those things or actions that assist it in reaching its perfection. For example, the right kind of soil and moisture are good for the acorn in reaching its perfection as an oak tree. Likewise, those things that inhibit or prevent something from reaching its end are bad for it, as drought or poisoned soil would be bad for an acorn. In each case, Aristotle would refer to the good things for the growth of the oak tree as natural to it, and the bad things for its growth as unnatural to it. What is good or natural for something is therefore intrinsic to that thing, internal to and inseparable from it. It is not imposed from the outside, nor can it be altered.
Well, what is the standard we should use to measure things regarding man’s nature and end, and how do we discern what is in in accord with it or against it? Aristotle states, open quotes, “In order to find what is natural, we must look among those things which according to nature are in a sound condition, not among those that are corrupt.” If you want to know what a healthy man is, you do not look at a sick man, you look at a healthy man.
In politics, he says, “Thus the human being to be studied is the one whose state is best, best both in body and soul. In him, this is clear.” Thus, because we know what a human being is in the fullest, we can understand what a privation is, including for each and every part of man. For example, let us say for the sake of argument that 2020 vision is the best for the eye, and blindness is the worst. With 2020 vision, the eye has reached its complete actuality. It is perfect as an eye. It possesses no potential to see better than it does. In each case of imperfection there is something missing that ought to be there. For instance, the limb ought to be able to move in its full strength. The ear ought to be able to hear and the eye to see.
The further a thing is from its perfection, the more defective or corrupt, as Aristotle used the term, it is. Just as blindness is the furthest defect of an eye. A privation of the good cannot itself be good. In fact, as St Augustine said, evil is a privation of the good.
Now, man alone has the ability to choose between those acts or things which are conducive to his end, and those which are not. Animals, plants, or rocks cannot do this. Only man can act in defiance of his nature, which is what defines evil for him. Since man freely chooses his behavior, he is the only one for whom natural law is moral. This is why Aristotle said. “The moral activities are human par excellence.”
Therefore, references to natural law in regard to man mean not so much the physical laws or instinct to which he is subject, like the lower orders of being, but the moral law which applies exclusively to him. Man does not get to fabricate his end or telos. Human nature is a given. Its meaning is not located in man’s will or desires but in pre-existing reality, in what is. Consequently, while man can know what is good or evil according to his nature, he does not have the prerogative to determine what is good or evil.
Oughtness is already in the given nature of things, therefore man is morally obliged to choose the good that will bring about what ought to be. Otherwise, he will become less than fully human and what he ought not to be, perhaps something worse than a beast as Aristotle warned. If everything human must be measured against it, what is man’s telos? Aristotle answered, “Happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue.”
Having established the primacy of reason as the highest human faculty, Aristotle asked in what way it served man’s end. He answered that the highest exercise of man’s reason is contemplation of the highest good which is divine. He wrote, “Contemplation is the highest form of activity since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects it apprehends are the highest things that can be known.” He said that “the activity of God which surpasses all others in blessedness must be contemplative. And of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.”
If man is by nature in relation to a divine good, it must mean that he has within himself some means of coming to know it. With his finite mind, man can somehow apprehend, at least in part, the infinite. Though he is not divine, man must strive to be godlike through the exercise of his reason. Aristotle counseled that, “We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and being mortal of mortal things, but must so far as we can make ourselves immortal and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us, for even if it be small in bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.”
We see in Aristotle’s account an adumbration of Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the final and perfect happiness as “nothing else than the vision of the divine essence.” Thus, it was thanks to Greek philosophy that reason became normative. For the first time, instead of dreams, the entrails of dismembered birds, or signs in the night sky, reason came to be the arbiter of right and wrong. It is through reason, not from the gods of the city, tribal mores, or the spirits of things that man can discern what is just from what is unjust, what is good from what is evil, what is myth from what is reality. He can now discern natural causality and ascribe to things their true causes, rather than assigning magical properties to everything.
Red dog urine, contrary to Babylonian belief, is not actually a causal factor in producing happiness. Behaving reasonably, or doing what accords with reason, becomes the standard of moral behavior, and therefore the standard of law. To do what is unreasonable is wrong. As Aquinas, reflecting Aristotle, would later say, the essential character of sin or vice is its irrationality. However, Aristotle’s definition of happiness set up a major dilemma of which we must be aware if we are to understand the significance of the contribution of Christianity.
Both Socrates and Aristotle admitted that the attainment of wisdom was so difficult that few if any could achieve it. Aristotle said that leisure is a necessary condition for the contemplation of the good. As only a few possess leisure, this presents a huge problem. What is more, even those with leisure face nearly insurmountable obstacles in obtaining wisdom because human nature, as Aristotle said, is in many ways in bondage, so that “the possession of wisdom might be justly regarded as beyond human power.”
This statement seems to be in tension with Aristotle’s teaching that nature ever seeks an end and always the tendency in each is towards the same end. And if there is no impediment, how is it then that in all of nature only man’s end seems to be practically beyond the reach because of seemingly insurmountable impediments? If the possession of wisdom is the final perfection of man, how is it that even in the best regime the many will never be wise? What about the peasants, workers, and slaves who do not have the possibility of reaching the height of human attainment because they have no leisure to pursue it? What is the purpose or end of their lives? Only to support the leisure of those who do pursue it? Then most of humanity is left out, doomed to frustration.
Leo Strauss observed, “If striving for knowledge of the eternal truth is the ultimate end of man, the man who is merely just or moral without being a philosopher appears as a mutilated human being.” As Aquinas would later say, “To strive for any end that cannot be secured is futile.” Therefore, the happiness to which all men are naturally ordered as their final perfection cannot not consist in the happiness of only a very few. That would indeed be futile. Thus, philosophy raised a question that it could not answer.
How could man have a nature whose end is practically unobtainable? The very keenness of this conundrum made Christian revelation intelligible to the Hellenistic world when it first received it because it addressed the problem that man seemed to be made for something beyond his reach.
Against the preceding Greek philosophical background, one can come closer to realizing the electrifying effect of the opening of the Gospel of John, which was written in Greek. The English translation uses the word for logos, but it can be rendered just as well by reason. For our purposes here let us leave the Greek word logos in the quotation. “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him,” revelation confirmed.
Heraclitus’s intuition that logos makes the universe comprehensible because all things were made by and through logos. Logos is not an it, an intelligible principle or cosmic force, but a who. This is what John announces so majestically, the word incarnate. The startling thing about Christianity is that logos does not simply remain as the wisdom behind the world but rather enters into it, logos made flesh and dwelt among us.
What if Heraclitus, having speculated on logos, met logos walking through the door? The face of logos made visible is the transforming experience for a Hellenized Christianity or the Christianized Hellenism. The disclosure of Christ as logos could not be a clearer message that revelation involves reason. We also know that creation was made by way of his divine intellect. God willed or loved creation into being, but it was and is according to his word.
At the level of revelation, we now know why the world is rational: because God is reason. God speaks to man with equal force through his reason as he does through divine revelation. Recall St Paul’s famous words to the Romans, “For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, his everlasting power and also his divinity.” And does not St Peter urge that Christians “be ready always to satisfy everyone that ask of you a reason of the hope which is in you?”
Early Church Father Clement of Alexandria insisted on the relevance of reason to faith. “Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ.” The mid-century Second Epistle of Clement, also known as the Recognitions, spelled out the necessity of reason to faith. It is worth hearing at length.
“Do not think that we say that these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason, for indeed, it is not safe to commit these things to bear faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason, and therefore he who has received these things fortified by reason can never lose them, whereas he who receives them without proofs, by an ascent to a simple statement of them, can neither keep them safely, nor is certain if they are true because he who easily believes also easily yields.
But he who has sought reason for those things which he has believed and received, as though bound by chains of reason itself, can never be torn away or separated from those things which he hath believed. And therefore, according as anyone is more anxious in demanding a reason by so much will he be the firmer in preserving his faith.
“Heaven forbid,” St Augustine would later exclaim, “that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.” He also said, “Believers are also thinkers, in believing they think, and in thinking they believe. If faith does not think, it is nothing.”
Now, if God is logos, reason and revelation are not at an impasse. A division of labor defines them. The first Vatican Council put the distinction clearly. There is a two-fold order of knowledge, distinct both in origin and in object. In origin because our knowledge in the one is by natural reason, and in the other by divine faith. In object because, besides those things to which natural reason can attain, there are proposed to our belief, mysteries hidden in God, which unless revealed cannot be known.
The common objective is the search for in the apprehension of the highest things. In Christianity, Father James V. Schall said, “Revelation itself has turned to philosophy precisely to explain more fully what is revealed.” Christian revelation confirms reason in its authority. At the same time, revelation has a claim on reason. A philosophy that a priori excludes the possibility of revelation is a philosophy that is not true to itself. On its own terms, philosophy must remain open to revelation.
Father Schall maintained that revelation, though it discloses truths beyond the ability of philosophy to arrive at unassisted, nonetheless addresses itself to the same reason that philosophy considers. He said revelation articulates a clearer and more defined end than even the philosopher could envision by his own powers. Yet the efforts of the philosopher to envision this end were themselves needed to understand why revelational answers were answers to real questions that did not arise only from revelation.
Though he had an inkling of it, Socrates did not know that there is a greater gift than philosophy. But without the philosophical endeavor, could man have come to understand the overwhelming significance of this greater gift? If the puzzle of man’s purpose had not been posed by Aristotle, could man have adequately appreciated the solution to it? If you have not asked the question, you will not understand the answer.
As mentioned earlier, Aristotle saw the need to, in so far as we can, make ourselves immortal and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the thing that is best in us, yet he clearly perceived that only a few with leisure could even attempt it.
What of the vast majority of mankind who are incapable of the philosophical life?
Christianity solved this dilemma posed by Aristotle by offering, as Father Schall noted, to encompass a destiny that might include all men, even non-philosophers. This conclusion meant that the highest things were intended for more than just philosophers. Indeed, resurrection accomplishes that final personal happiness which political theory initially proposes for man but for which it had no answer.
What Aristotle could only vaguely intimate regarding man’s striving to imitate the divine comes to startling fruition in Christ’s offer to share his divine life with each person. Individual man moves from paltry insignificance to inestimable worth. In the eyes of the world, man is seen is next to nothing in the brief span of his life. Christianity reveals otherwise. For the first time the hidden identity of man is disclosed. His natural end is superseded by a supernatural one in which he partakes of divine life.
Saint John made the extraordinary statement, “It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is.” The implication is very clear, that man’s destiny is actually to share in God’s divine life. Man’s end, then, is outside history in personal union with a transcendent and loving God, something man could not dare to have hoped for, much less imagined, until God revealed himself in Christ as desiring nothing more than to share his inner life with his creatures, to impart to them his own divinity.
Each person could participate in the divine order of salvation as an individual, not through his participation as a citizen of his polis, or the mediation of a semi divine ruler. To say that this was a revolutionary disclosure is an understatement. However, the harmonization of faith and reason in Christianity was disrupted in the late Middle Ages by, among others, William of Occam through his exaggerated concern for God’s omnipotence and absolute freedom of will, and his detestation of what he thought was the contamination of Christianity by pagan, meaning Aristotelian, metaphysics.
He challenged the Thomist teaching that God’s will proceeds from His divine intellect, and not the other way around. This is the core issue of that time and our own. Aquinus argued that since God is logos or reason itself, His “will follows upon His intellect.” Reason rules, will follows, the word precedes action.
This was not a new teaching in Christianity. Going back to the third century, Hippolytus said of God, “He thought of it, the cosmos, willed it, spoke the word, and so made it.” The primacy of intellect is clear. The intellect directs the will, the will then acts in accord with reason.
Occam thought that God’s freedom was compromised by this teaching. He flipped the relationship between intellect and will. God’s will now becomes primary, his intellect subordinate to it as a mere instrument. This changes everything. It is no longer God’s knowledge that constitutes being. It is His will that does so. In fact, God knows, because He wills, will precedes knowledge. It is the act that produces knowledge, not knowledge that produces the act. Will becomes the ontological principle.
Let us be clear. Either reason rules and the will follows, or will rules and reason follows. In the latter case, reason simply becomes a tool for the will to use in however it wishes to accomplish what it wills. What is more, and here is the key, key point, it is impossible intelligibly to distinguish among instances of will on the basis of will alone.
This was a revolutionary change with seismic consequences. Unless the divine intellect is precedent to the divine will, logos cannot be imprinted in creation as its essential aspect. The more inscrutable the divine will, the opaquer reality becomes as its product. A Spanish scholar, Fernandez-Santamaria, wrote, “Occam has done away with the logos, and all that is left in God is will, a will that cannot be bound or limited by reason inspired actions or assumptions of man. Having expelled from the mind of God the intelligible world of Plato, French philosopher Etienne Gilson said “Having expelled from the mind of God the intelligible world of Plato, Occam was satisfied that no intelligibility could be found in any of God’s works. How could there be order in nature, when there is no nature?”
Creation is not imprinted with reason. It cannot reflect what is not there. As a result, there is no rational order invested in the universe upon which one can rely, only the second-to-second manifestation of God’s will, which he can change at any moment for no reason.
Aquinas said that “the first cause of the universe is mind, and that the last end of the universe must be the good of the mind that is truth, and that in the contemplation of truth man finds the principal object of wisdom.” For voluntarists like Occam, the first cause of the universe is will, not mind, therefore the last end of the universe cannot be the good of the mind. The overthrow of the relationship between reason and faith is complete. Man’s final end is no longer rational.
Without an inherent end by which to judge the goodness or evil of his actions as taking him toward or away from the perfection of his nature, man is adrift. He has no natural good to guide him in reality. According to nominalist metaphysics, acts are intrinsically neither good nor bad except in so far as God makes them so. As if in answer to Socrates’s famous question in the Euthyphro, voluntarists like Occam say God does not command certain behavior because it is good, it is good because He commands it, and He can change His will at any moment.
There is not anything objective in the character of acts themselves. By his command, God could turn vices into virtues, and for instance require us to commit adultery or even idolatry. In this radical view of God’s omnipotence, He is not only the primary cause of things but the only cause. There are no secondary causes, such as cause and effect in the natural world. Gravity does not make objects fall to the Earth, God does. Fire does not burn cotton, God does.
One must reject the natural order of the universe to protect God’s omnipotence in this view. God was not to be limited by any laws of nature. Essences are an affront to him. This loss of intelligibility provided some centuries later the foundation for David Hume’s famous is ought distinction made in the 18th century, or what later came to be called the fact value distinction, which continues to afflict us today.
This asserts that there can be no moral guidance from what exists, or what is, to what ought to be. When cannot derive an ought from an is, or a value from a fact. This is another consequence of claiming that nature cannot be normative, because there are no ends in it, no telos to guide things to become what they should be in their fullest according to their essences. In short, there is no foundation in reality for what ought to be.
Once one is rid of essences, there is not an ought in sight. We are simply left with what is. Machiavelli would take great advantage of this. It is no surprise that Hume concluded that, “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Your reason is a slave to your passions.
Well, it is no great leap from the voluntarist exaltation of the will of God to the voluntarist exaltation to the will of man. If God is a voluntarist, we become voluntarists. By voluntarists I mean premised only on will, not in reason. After all, if God’s intellect is subordinate to his will, why should man be any different in subordinating his reason to his will? As a consequence, one gets to make up one’s own values. Truth is located in the will.
This becomes a very dangerous teaching when it is politicized. If law is no longer reason, what is it? Man’s law becomes its own standard based only on the will of the ruler, whether one or many, predisposed to nothing but itself. As Bertrand de Jouvenel warned, “The man who finds in God before all else, will in power will be disposed to the same view of human government.”
Forty years ago, German philosopher Hans Blumenberg remarked, “When God becomes nominalism’s Deus absconditus, the hidden God, the god of whom we can know nothing because he is pure will, the world loses its rational base and man is left to find whatever meaning and purpose he can through his own efforts, and that leads to the modern project of self-affirmation and self-assertion.”
An early manifestation of this self-assertion came in the form of Marquis of Condorcet’s The Progress of the Human Mind, which epitomizes the ambition of the modern project. “My work will prove by fact and reasoning that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties, that the perfectibility of man is truly limitless.”
The phrase the limitless perfectibility of man captures the metaphysical incoherence of modernity. Limitless perfectibility is an oxymoron. Anything limitless is by definition incapable of perfection. As we have seen, the perfection of something is the fulfillment of its nature. If perfectibility is without limits, as Condorcet says, it means that it loses its direction because nature is precisely about limits, and if no direction exists, regression is indistinguishable from progression.
De Tocqueville wrote that men of the revolution, the French Revolution, “had a robust faith in man’s perfectibility and power. They had no doubt that they were appointed to transform the human race. These sentiments and passions had become a sort of new religion.” The object of faith in this new religion changes from God to humanity, from a God centered perspective to one of man’s self-sufficiency, or rather his self-creation, but never to man as he is, only to man as he could be or must become.
In the communist version, Homo sapiens becomes Homo sovieticus. Under the Nazi ideology, man as he is must be purged of his racial impurities to reign as Uber mensch, the overman or the beyond man, who creates and imposes his own values. All of this testifies to the truth of GK Chesterton’s quip, here paraphrased, that the man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing, rather he will believe in anything.
Chesterton also said, “Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.” We seem now to have reached that point of ignorance because we have had more than one set of thinkers espousing this teaching for many and for more than one generation.
If we do not know what we are or who we are, we can self-identify as anything. This self-identification is not the result of knowing oneself but of willing oneself. If what one wills is the principal constituent of reality, there is no standard by which one act of the will can be differentiated from any other act of the will. Thus, I have no right to judge your values, and you cannot judge mine.
The common good is the casualty, therefore a man can self-identify as a woman.
However, why can’t I self-identify as someone who finds that utterly absurd if I do not want to be cancelled? We are living in a period of moral and cultural self-asphyxiation. It will end us if we do not return to reality soon.
Let us transpose the self-identity talk to an earlier period to illustrate this absurdity. The Nazis, who believed in the primacy of will, self-identified as racist haters of Jews and Slavs, whom they proceeded to slaughter and enslave. Did opposition to this arise because the opponent simply self-identified as anti-Nazis? No, it arose among those who held that all men are created equal is a universal truth, and that therefore what the Nazis were doing was objectively evil and must be stopped.
The uncle after whom I was named gave his life in order to stop it. He did not make that sacrifice so that people could self-identify but so that the universal truth that is the true basis of freedom would be upheld. Well, what goes first, faith or reason? That is very much a chicken and egg kind of question. It seems to me that they both stand or fall together.
Without faith, reason has shown itself capable of reasoning itself out of existence. Fulton Sheen once described an intellectual as someone who has been educated beyond his intelligence. Reason without faith ultimately ends in neo-ism. Without reason, faith becomes something like Sunni Islam.
Today there is not a faith/reason fight. There is a faith/reason flight. Our current condition illustrates that a society will decline to the extent that it loses faith, and that the loss of reason is concurrent with it. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “Anglo-American civilization is the result of two distinct elements, which in other places have been in frequent disagreement but which the Americans have succeeded in incorporating to some extent, one with the other and combining admirably. I allude to the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.”
Can it be any surprise that as our spirit of religion has declined, so too has our spirit of liberty? So we come full circle, if at times by a circuitous route, to the question of the relationship of faith and reason. If you are told that your faith excludes your reason, ask how it knows that. If you are told your reason excludes your faith, ask how it could know that.
You need your reason to understand your faith more fully, and you need your faith to open your reason to what is otherwise beyond it. Always keep before yourself your ultimate destination. Seek the truth. Recognize and know it. Live by it. Abide in it. That is why we are here. This is our purpose. God bless Hillsdale College.
Q&A
Presenter:
Thank you, Mr. Reilly. Mr. Reilly has agreed to sign copies of his book, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, on the second floor of the sural lobby following this session. We do have time for some Q&A. If you have a question, please make your way to one of the microphones in the side aisles.
Audience member:
You mentioned the faith fact value split, which is something we discuss, actually, quite a bit in the Western theological tradition core class, and then right at the end to live and abide by our faith. Do you have any suggestions on how to open up that conversation with people who are unwilling to listen and how to bring that idea back into our society?
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, I mean this sounds like a perverse comment, but you know, thank heavens for the Nazis. I mean you can always say to them, ought we to have opposed the Nazis? Ought we to have? Is that a fact, or is that a value, or how would you know you ought to do that? There must be some moral foundation for that.
And the other thing is, you know, I find this very curious. No one goes to an eye doctor and receives a diagnosis, and then says to the doctor, oh well, that is what you think. If it is something serious, maybe you get a second opinion, but they would never say, well, I do not think that, that is just your opinion.
No. Why? Why not?
Well, because the ophthalmologist or the optometrist knows what the eye is for. What is it for? Well, to see. And if it is not seeing, it is suffering from a corruption, an imperfection. And from his studies he would know where in that imperfection lies and may be able to correct it. That is why you go to him. The only reason he knows that is because he knows the purpose of an eye, what an eye ought to be.
And we can march through the human body and make the same observations, except when you go below the waist. People say, well, what could that possibly be for? Well, let us just experiment and find – no, no, we know just as much about that. The natural moral law rules that just as much as it does everything else. As people remonstrate with you that they are saying you ought not to, well, that is an ought. Where did they get it? Probably from an is somewhere. They just do not understand that the fact value distinction is itself a corruption of reason.
I am sure that is going to win you a lot of friends. You just take them right through that. I am sorry for going on so long, but actually I cut this talk. You would have been in more pain.
Audience member:
Thanks for being here. My question was about discerning what the ultimate end of something is. You spoke well from Aristotle that you determine what is good based off of something’s end, and to what degree it reaches that end, and to what degree it corrupts before it gets to that end. It seems to me that many reasonable people disagree about the end of man, and with respect to many social issues, also with respect to political things, reasonable people disagree about what the purpose of man is and what a good life looks like. So what does that bring us to, and how do we resolve those reasonable disagreements, and what does faith have to say in those disagreements?
Robert R. Reilly:
Well, I think what you encounter today more often than not in such disagreements is you are talking to someone who does not think man has any purpose at all, and therefore it is just, you know, he says, she says, or that is your opinion, or you do not have the right to judge me, and there is no basis for judgment, whereas they would admit that those ends exist every time they go to a doctor. And yet, all of a sudden, they do not exist when it comes to a moral issue which could be corrupting their soul. Do you think anyone would contest that the end of man is happiness?
Well, they say it is unhappiness. I do not think you would find many people who would not say that the end of our nature is to be happy. They might say we do not have a nature, just as people say that the universe is accidental, right? How could anything have a purpose if all of this happened by accident? The alternative is if there is no logos, then everything is accidental, and then of course there are no ends, there are just accidents.
Now, if you can establish that that that end exists, like happiness obtainable through the life of virtue, there can be, then, quite legitimate and very interesting arguments about the means to reach that end, and often those discussions are sort of on prudential matters, how best to reach the acknowledged end of that happiness, which is the ultimate perfection of our nature.
The other thing, you know, you find out is that there is something wrong with death. No one wants – well, very few people really want to die, and we rebel at the thought of dying. We rebel at the thought of not existing. I remember when my kids were very young. One of them [asked], ‘Where was I when that picture, you know, was taken of the other kids?’ Well, Matthew, you did not exist yet. I had to be. Well, no, actually you did not. You came into being, so once you have an experience of death in a family, or loved one, there is an enormous grievance there.
You know, there is something wrong with death that happiness must also involve immortality, and that of course is what Aristotle argues, I mean Socrates argues, for mainly from justice that we have to have immortal souls in order for perfect justice to be achieved in the afterlife. But it also obtains to the end of happiness, so there are all kinds of human experiences that scream out for this kind of treatment. Now, I guess it is a tough question. It is a really good question. Thank you for it, so I am happy to talk to anybody upstairs for the book signing if you buy one. I thank you, my children, thank you. Maybe I can even get Larry Arnn to thank you. That would be one, so thank you very much.