Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  ‌Expanding Faith’s Intellectual Frontiers

  Equipped with practical ethics, a believable God, and coherent ways of representing him, Christians and Muslims still had to face major intellectual difficulties: fitting their religions into potentially rival systems, such as science and personal faith in individuals’ religious experience; adjusting them to diverse and mutable political contexts; and working out strategies of evangelization in a violent world where hearts and minds are more susceptible to coercion than conviction. We can look at how they coped with each of these tasks in turn.

  Christian thinkers’ synthesis of classical and Jewish ideas seems to have reached a tipping point after 325, when the Church proclaimed the doctrine of homoousion or consubstantiality – the essential sameness – of Father and Son. The social and intellectual respectability of Christianity became unquestionable, except by pagan diehards. The elite produced ever increasing numbers of converts. Emperor Julian ‘the apostate’, who struggled to reverse the trend, died in 363, allegedly conceding victory to Christ. By the time of the definitive adoption of Christianity as the emperors’ only religion in 380, paganism seemed provincial and old-fashioned. In the mounting chaos of the fifth century, however, the world in which Christ and the classics met seemed under threat. Religious zealots menaced the survival of ancient secular learning. So did barbarian incursions, the withdrawal of traditional elites from public life, the impoverishment and abandonment of the old pagan educational institutions. In China in the third century bce compilers instructed invaders. So the Roman world needed compendia of the wisdom of antiquity to keep learning alive under siege.

  Boethius, whom we have met as a mediator of Augustine’s views on time and predestination, and who never even alluded to the differences between pagan and Christian thinking, produced a vital contribution: his guide – a duffer’s guide, one could almost say – to Aristotle’s logic. Throughout the Middle Ages, it remained the prime resource for Christian thinkers, who gradually embellished it and made it ever more complicated. About a hundred years after Boethius, St Isidore of Seville compiled scientific precepts from ancient sources that were in danger of extinction. With successive enhancements, his work fed into that of Christian encyclopaedists for the following thousand years. In the parts of the Roman Empire that Muslims conquered over the next hundred years or so, the survival of classical culture seemed doomed, at first, to obliteration by desert-born fanatics. But Muslim leaders rapidly recognized the usefulness of existing elites and of the learning they wielded from the Greek and Roman past. In Islam, therefore, scholars collected and collated texts and passed them on to Christian counterparts. Part of the effect was the ‘Renaissance’ of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the West, when exchanges between Christendom and Islam were prolific. Renewed contacts, meanwhile, by way of trade and travel across the steppes, Silk Roads, and monsoonal corridors of Eurasia, enriched thinking as in the first millennium bce.

  In consequence, some Christian and Muslim thinkers of the time were so familiar with the reason and science of antiquity that they naturally thought of secular and religious learning not just as compatible but also mutually reflective and symbiotic. Two examples will have to do service as illustrations of what became possible in the West. Consistently with the sentiments of our own times, Peter Abelard is now most celebrated for his love affair with his pupil Heloise; they exchanged some of the most moving letters that survive from the Middle Ages. He was lesser in love than his paramour, whose letters – painful in their despair, mild in their reproaches, candid in their sentiments – record moving insights into how affective feelings trump conventional morals. In logic, however, Abelard was insuperable. Castration by the outraged uncle confined him to a teacher’s proper sphere, while Heloise became an ornament of the religious life. He exposed tensions between reason and religion in a stunning set of paradoxes: the evident purpose of his long, self-exculpatory preface is that, with proper humility and caution, students can identify errors in apparently venerable traditions. Abelard’s older contemporary St Anselm also recorded thoughts about God, using reason as his only guide, without having to defer to Scripture or to tradition or to the authority of the Church. He is often credited with ‘proving’ the existence of God, but that was not his purpose. Rather, he helped to show that belief in God is reasonable. He vindicated Catholicism’s claim that divinely conferred powers of reason make God discoverable. He started from Aristotle’s assumption that ideas must originate in perceptions of realities – an assumption that other thinkers questioned but which is at least stimulating: if you have an idea unsampled in experience, where do you get it from? Anselm’s argument, as simply – perhaps excessively so – as I can put it, was that absolute perfection, if you can imagine it, must exist, because if it did not, you could imagine a degree of perfection that exceeds it – which is impossible. In much of the rest of his work, Anselm went on to show that God, if he does exist, is intelligible as Christian teaching depicts him: human, loving, suffering. It bears thinking about: if God’s nature is not human and suffering, why is the human condition so tortured, and the world as wicked as it is?

  There were Christian thinkers who were equally brilliant at making Christianity rational and scientific. The century and a half after the period of Anselm and Abelard was a vibrant time of scientific and technological innovation in western Europe. Towards the end of the period, St Thomas Aquinas, sticking to reason as a guide to God, summed up the learning of the age with amazing range and clarity.32 Among his demonstrations that the existence of God is a reasonable hypothesis, none resonated in later literature more than his claim that creation is the best explanation for the existence of the natural world. Critics have oversimplified his doctrine to the point of absurdity, supposing that he thought that everything that exists must have a cause. Really, he said the opposite: that nothing would exist at all if everything real has to be contingent, as our existence, say, is contingent on that of the parents who engendered and bore us. There must be an uncreated reality, which might be the universe itself, but which might equally well be prior to and beyond contingent nature. We can call it God.

  Like Anselm, Aquinas was more concerned with understanding what God might be like once we acknowledge the possibility that the deity exists. In particular, he confronted the problem of how far the laws of logic and science could extend into the realm of a creator. He bound God’s omnipotence in thongs of logic when he decided there were some things God could not do, because they were incompatible with divine will. God could not, for instance, make illogicalities logical or inconsistencies consistent. He could not command evil. He could not change the rules of arithmetic so as to make two times three equal anything other than six. He could not extinguish himself. Or at least, perhaps, if theoretically he could do such things, he would not, because he wants us to use his gifts of reason and science and – while allowing us liberty to get things wrong – will never delude us or subvert truths of his own making. Aquinas insisted that ‘what is divinely taught to us by faith cannot be contrary to what we learn by nature: … since we have both from God, He would be the cause of our error, which is impossible’.33

  Aquinas was part of what can properly be called a scientific movement – perhaps even a scientific revolution or renaissance – in high-medieval Europe. He followed the precepts of one of its luminaries – his own teacher, St Albertus Magnus, whose statue stares from the door-frame of a science building at my university and who claimed that God worked primarily by and through scientific laws, or ‘natural causes’ in the terminology of the time. Empiricism was all the rage, perhaps because intensified cultural exchange with Islam reintroduced texts of Aristotle and other scientifically minded ancients, and perhaps because renewed contacts with China, thanks to exceptionally peaceful conditions in central Asia, restored the circumstances of the last great age of Western empiricism in the mid-first millennium bce, when, as we have seen (see here), trans-Eurasian routes were busy with traders, trav
ellers, and warriors. Confidence in experimentation verged on or even veered beyond the absurd in the mid-thirteenth century, as the work of Frederick II, ruler of Germany and Sicily, shows. He was a science buff of an extreme kind and the most relentless experimenter of the age. Investigating the effects of sleep and exercise on the digestion, he had – so it was said – two men disembowelled. Entering a debate about the nature of humans’ ‘original’ or ‘natural’ language, he had children brought up in silence ‘in order to settle the question … But he labored in vain’, said a contemporary narrator, writing more, perhaps, for éclat than enlightenment, ‘because all the children died.’34

  Parisian teachers in the third quarter of the thirteenth century developed a sort of theology of science. Nature was God’s work; science, therefore, was a sacred obligation, disclosing the wonder of creation, and therefore unveiling God. An inescapable question was therefore whether science and reason, when they were in agreement, trumped scripture or tradition or the authority of the Church as a means of disclosing God’s mind. Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, colleagues at the University of Paris, who collaborated in the 1260s and 1270s, pointed out that the doctrines of the Church on the creation and the nature of the soul were in conflict with classical philosophy and empirical evidence. ‘Every disputable question’, they argued, ‘must be determined by rational arguments.’ The proposition was both compelling and disturbing. Some thinkers – at least according to critics who damned or derided them – took refuge in an evasive idea: ‘double truth’, according to which things true in faith could be false in philosophy and vice versa. In 1277 the Bishop of Paris, taking the opportunity to interfere in the business of the university, condemned this doctrine (along with a miscellany of magic, superstition, and quotations from Muslim and pagan authors).35

  Meanwhile, another professor at the University of Paris, Roger Bacon, was serving the cause of science by condemning excessive deference to authority – including ancestral wisdom, custom, and consensus – as a cause of ignorance. Experience, by contrast, was a reliable source of knowledge. Bacon was a Franciscan friar, whose enthusiasm for science was linked, perhaps, with St Francis’s rehabilitation of nature: the world was worth observing, because it made ‘the lord of all creatures’ manifest. Bacon insisted that science could help to validate scripture or improve our understanding of sacred texts. Medical experiments, he pointed out, could increase knowledge and save life. He even claimed that science could cow and convert infidels, citing the examples of the lenses with which Archimedes set fire to a Roman fleet during the siege of Syracuse.

  Friars may seem odd heralds of a scientific dawn. But St Francis himself, properly understood, can hardly be bettered as an instance. Superficial students and devotees look at him and see only a man of faith so intense and complete as to make reason seem irrelevant and evidence otiose. His irrationality was theatrical. He turned his renunciation of possessions into a performance when he stripped naked in the public square of his native town. He preached to ravens to display his discontent with human audiences. He abjured great wealth to be a beggar. He affected the role of an anti-intellectual, denouncing learning as a kind of riches and a source of pride. He acted the holy fool. He proclaimed a faith so otherworldly that knowledge of this world could be of no help. On the other hand, nature really mattered to Francis. He opened his eyes – and ours – to the godliness of God’s creation, even the apparently crude, sometimes squalid blear and smear of the world and the creatures in it. His contribution to the history of sensibilities alerted us to the wonder of all things bright and beautiful: the loveliness of landscape, the potential of animals, the fraternity of the sun and the sorority of the moon. His scrupulous, realistic image of nature was part of the scientific trend of his time. Observation and understanding mattered to him as to the scientists. You can see Francis’s priorities in the art he inspired: the realism of the paintings Franciscans made or commissioned for their churches, the new sense of landscape that fills backgrounds formerly smothered with gilding, the scenes of sacred history relocated in nature.

  The high-medieval spirit of experiment, the new mistrust of untested authority, has long been thought to be the basis of the great leap forward in science, which, in the long run, helped to equip Western civilization with knowledge and technology superior to those of its rivals.36 In fact other influences seem to have been more important: the voyages of discovery of the fifteenth century onwards opened European eyes to intriguing visions of the world and crammed with the raw material of science – samples and specimens, images and maps – the wonder chambers of knowledge that European rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries compiled. The magical quest for power over nature overspilled into science: the lust for learning of the magi of the Renaissance, symbolized by Dr Faustus, the fictional character who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge, fused with every kind of enquiry. Successive renaissances reacquainted European elites with ancient empiricism. A ‘military revolution’ displaced aristocracies from the battlefield, liberating the curriculum from the exercise of arms, and noble fortunes for the practice of science.

  Nevertheless, the ideas of Roger Bacon and other scientific thinkers of the thirteenth century were important for the reaction they provoked. ‘How can the supernatural conform to the laws of nature?’ critics asked. If God’s work has to be intelligible to science, what becomes of miracles? In part, recoil took the form of rejection of reason and science. A God reducible to logic, accessible to reason, aloof from revelation, is, to some sensibilities, a God not worth believing in – passionless and abstract, removed from the flesh and blood, the pain and patience that Christ embodied. Reason confines God. If he has to be logical, the effect is to limit his omnipotence.

  Many of the philosophers in Aquinas’s shadow hated what they called ‘Greek necessitarianism’ – the idea of a God bound by logic. They felt that by reconciling Christianity with classical philosophy, Aquinas had polluted it. The teacher William of Ockham, who died in 1347, led a strong movement of that kind. He denounced the logicians and apostles of reason for forcing God’s behaviour into channels logic permitted. He coined frightening paradoxes. God, he said, can command you to perform a murder if he so wishes, such is the measure of his omnipotence, and ‘God can reward good with evil’: Ockham did not, of course, mean that literally, but uttered the thought to show the limitations of logic. For a time, the teaching of Aristotle was suspended pending ‘purgation’ of his errors.37 Suspicion of reason subverts one of our main means of establishing agreement with each other. It undermines the belief – which was and remains strong in the Catholic tradition – that religion has to be reasonable. It fortifies dogma and makes it difficult to argue with opinionated people. It nourishes fundamentalism, which is essentially and explicitly irrational. Many of the Protestants of the Reformation rejected reason as well as authority in turning back to Scripture as the only basis of faith. The extreme position was attained by the eighteenth-century sect known as the Muggletonians, who thought reason was a diabolic subterfuge to mislead humankind: the serpent’s apple that God had warned us to resist.

  Meanwhile, the Church – formerly a patron of science – began a long relationship of suspicion with it. Except in medical schools, late-medieval universities abandoned interest in science. Although some religious orders – especially the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – continued to sponsor important scientific work, innovations tended to be repudiated at first and accepted with reluctance. Fr Ted Hesburgh, the legendary president of my university, who trained as an astronaut in order to be the first celebrant of the Mass in space, and who represented the Holy See on the International Atomic Energy Commission, used to say that if science and religion seemed to be in conflict, there must be something wrong with the science, or with the religion, or both. The idea that science and religion are enemies is false: they concern distinct, if overlapping, spheres of human experience. But the presumption has proved ext
remely hard to overcome.

  ‌The Frontier of Mysticism

  Apart from rejecting reason and science, other thinkers in the Middle Ages sought ways around them – better approaches to truth. Their big recourse was what we call mysticism, or, to put it more mildly, the belief that by inducing abnormal mental states – ecstasy or trance or visionary fervour – you can achieve a sense of union with God, an emotional self-identification with his loving nature. You can apprehend God directly through a sort of hotline. To those of us who have not had them, mystical experiences are hard to express, understand, and appreciate. It may help, however, to approach the problems through the experiences of a fellow-non-mystic: St Augustine, who, although he befriended logic, mastered classical learning, and was a thinker more subtle and supple than almost any other in the history of thought, contributed profoundly to the history of Christian mysticism. As far as we can tell, he never had a mystical experience. He did once, by his own account, have a vision, perhaps better described as a dream: he was puzzling over the doctrine of the Trinity when a little boy, digging on the beach, confronted him. When Augustine asked the purpose of the hole, the child replied that he proposed to drain the sea into it. Augustine pointed out that the laws of physics would make that impossible. ‘You have as much chance of understanding the Trinity’, replied the digger.38 This charming story hardly qualifies its author as a visionary. The whole trajectory of Augustine’s own life, rather than any sudden event, shaped his thinking. In his Confessions, he described his journey from childish feelings of guilt at selfishness and pubescent dilemmas at the onset of sensuality toward dependence on God.