Descartes

by A. C. Grayling

  This second major controversy took place at Leiden University. There too Descartes had a friend, Golius, and a disciple and champion, the logic professor Adriaan Heereboord. Throughout the first half of the 1640s Heereboord repeatedly proposed Cartesian theses for debate in the university, as a way of promoting and defending them. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the storm blowing in Utrecht over the same questions, the discussion of Cartesian philosophy at Leiden proceeded quietly until 1646, when a theology professor called Jacob Trigland disputed the very Cartesian assertion, put forward by one of Golius' students, that "doubt is the beginning of indubitable philosophy"—a tenet fundamental to the Discourse and the Meditations. Trigland's argument was that premising radical doubt as the starting point of enquiry would lead students into scepticism and atheism. As a result of Trigland's intervention the Senate of Leiden University banned Cartesian philosophy, and declared that only Aristotelianism could be taught in its faculties.

  This did not deter Heereboord, who continued to lecture on Cartesian themes, and in an oration argued that both Aristotle and St. Thomas—that sceptical St. Thomas whose empiricism required that he insert his finger into Christ's wound—used doubt as a route to certainty. What probably stung most was his remark that the Cartesian method of doubt helped to free minds from prejudices. This was too much for Jacob Revius, regent of the school of theology at Leiden University. He added his voice to Trigland's, and the latter now went further and claimed that Descartes was a blasphemer for suggesting that God might be a deceiver (in the Meditations Descartes strengthened the sceptical starting point by saying: in order to see whether there is anything you cannot possibly doubt, imagine that instead of being good, God is a deceiver who tries to give you false beliefs about everything. Is there anything he cannot make you falsely believe? Answer: yes—he cannot possibly make me believe the falsehood "I do not exist"13). For good measure, Trigland had also accused Descartes of being a Pelagian, that is, one who does not believe in the doctrine of original sin.

  Angered, Descartes wrote to the curators of Leiden University on 4 May 1647, demanding that they settle matters with Revius and Trigland, on pain of a public scandal. In his letter he defended himself earnestly against the imputation of blasphemy, but did not dilate too far on other charges; wisely so, for elsewhere in his correspondence he had committed himself to a few unorthodox positions, as for example believing in the basic goodness of human nature (which controverted the doctrine of original sin), and in the idea that everyone would eventually get to heaven (by no means a view that a self respecting anti-Arminian orthodox Calvinist could have possibly agreed with, though for Descartes' fellow Catholics this thought was a commonplace).

  The curators iterated their decision to forbid discussion of Cartesian views, and to require that Heereboord should confine himself to Aristotelian philosophy henceforth. When they wrote to Descartes accordingly, he replied that they had missed the point: he had demanded a retraction of the accusation of blasphemy, and an apology. Never one to let matters drift, at the same time he sent a complaint to his highly placed friends, who again spoke to the Prince of Orange. Although in a combative mood, Descartes found the controversies wearing: in May 1647 he wrote, "As for the peace I had previously sought here, I foresee that from now on I may not get as much of that as I would like. For I have not yet received all the satisfaction that is due to me for the insults I have suffered at Utrecht, and I see that further insults are on the way. A troop of theologians, followers of scholastic philosophy, seem to have formed a league in an attempt to crush me with their slanders."14

  While quiet words were being had in government circles, the dispute on the ground was heating up. At Christmas 1647 a tumult broke out at Leiden during a disputation between a Cartesian who had been a student of Regius at Utrecht, and a member of Leiden's theology faculty who had attacked the "new philosophy." Moreover, Revius had just published his A Theological Consideration of Descartes' Method (in which he made some stinging points: "[Descartes] is convinced that he is absolutely right about everything . . . what he means by certain words is never what anyone else means by them"), to which Heereboord replied by challenging Revius to a debate.

  The Prince of Orange now acted. He summoned Leiden University's rector, Frederik Spanheim, to come and see him. The rector duly presented himself at the Stadhouder's office on 12 January 1648. The prince told him to find a way of settling matters without further uproar, in any way that seemed best to him. It was a delicate matter for the rector, given that he had two schools of his university in arms against each other, in one of which—the theology faculty—some of the professors were distinguished and influential individuals. Spanheim took the only course open to him, and a drastic one: he banned the discussion of any metaphysics whatever, whether Cartesian or Aristotelian. He did this despite the fact that Revius complained bitterly that he was being prevented from opposing Descartes' dangerous theories, and despite the fact that the ban on metaphysics left Descartes' physics untouched: it continued to be taught in the university as before, much to the theologians' chagrin.15

  From this distance, both of time and mentality, it is no longer easy to appreciate the reasons why the "new philosophy" of Descartes appeared so threatening to the theologians and traditionalists of his day. To get a sense of the acuteness with which participants in these debates felt the anxiety of the challenge they faced, it is helpful to be reminded of the world picture that Descartes' new philosophy controverted.

  Religious, metaphysical and scientific orthodoxy at the opening of the seventeenth century was a synthesis of Christian theology with aspects of Aristotelian science. In the thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas had achieved a majestic harmonisation of Aristotle's science, Ptolemy's astronomy, and Galen's medicine—which more broadly included a conception of man in his material aspects—into a single philosophy serving Christian theology. This great synthesis is known as Thomism and, even for Protestant savants after the Reformation, the framework it provided continued to shape thinking, not least about what was theologically acceptable in the way of scientific and metaphysical enquiry.

  "Natural theology" concerned the existence and nature of God, and was permissible as an exercise of man's God-given reason, suitably constrained by revelation and the authority of the Church. A variety of arguments were adduced to prove God's existence and to research his nature (his omnipotence, omniscience, eternality, and so forth), and the two sets of questions were of course related— for example: if it is of the nature of God to be a necessary being, i.e. one that must exist and cannot not exist, then that fact by itself establishes that he exists. His existence can be deduced in other ways: the Cosmological Argument says that everything in the universe has a cause, so the universe must have a cause which is not itself caused by something else (at risk of infinite regress), so there must be a self-caused cause of everything; and this is God. Or, he can be proved to exist from the fact of design in all things: this is the Teleological argument. Or, he can be proved by reason alone: there is something in the universe that is the greatest or most perfect thing there is; such a thing that actually exists is greater or more perfect than such a thing that does not exist; therefore, the greatest or most perfect thing exists—and this is God.

  There is not much disagreement among philosophers now that none of these arguments works, for reasons that readers might entertain themselves by investigating; and there are eloquent voices of faith which say, as for example Soren Kierkegaard does, that in any case faith is what flies in the face of argument and reason, and is not faith otherwise.16

  But the chief source for understanding the relationship between mankind and the universe, and especially God, is the revelation of Scripture. The Reformation was precisely about the degree to which authority in this arena resided in Scripture, Protestants saying that it was the ultimate authority, Catholics saying that authority was shared between Scripture and the Church. Scripture taught that God created heaven and earth, and in them innume
rable creatures, including a great angelic host—one third of which (so some authorities had it) had rebelled and followed Satan out of heaven, supporting him thereafter in his efforts to thwart God's will. After God had created Adam and Eve, Satan tempted them from their allegiance, and therefore all subsequent human beings have fallen natures. Moreover, the hosts of bad angels infected all aspects of the sublunary realm, constantly and energetically seeking to subvert finite souls from their path to God by inspiring wicked deeds, heresies, witchcraft and false knowledge, all in order to bring as many souls to damnation as possible.

  To save mankind God revealed his will first, and somewhat obscurely, through the prophets, and then finally and perfectly through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In the light of that sacrifice all would be judged when the Last Trumpet sounded, an event confidently taken to be imminent by every generation of the faithful since.

  These tenets, give or take a few thousand details of fine tuning (all of which, however, were individually enough to send people to the stake if they were on the losing side of a disagreement about them), had been established by theologians in the centuries after the alleged events taken as their starting point—the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But views of the natural world were still essentially Aristotelian. In the Aristotelian view, the material world was built out of the four elements earth, air, fire and water.

  The elements had four properties: hotness, coldness, wetness, and dryness, and these combined in different ways to give the chief character of the elements: thus, earth was cold and dry, water was cold and wet; fire was hot and dry, air was hot and wet. (This last revealed the Greek origin of these ideas; air might be very wet in England, but it is not often hot.) Each element had its natural place; earth, being heavy, and also morally base, tended towards the centre of the universe. Water was the same, but less so, and therefore covered earth. Air belonged between water and the lightest element, fire, whose home was a region high above the earth; it could indeed be seen twinkling in the very highest regions of space.

  The elements were never encountered in their pure form, but always as admixtures, which were easily proved by chemical experiments in which they were separated or purified, e.g. by means of heat. The fact that combinations of elements could be rearranged by such means prompted alchemy, and not least its central quests of deriving precious metals from base metals, and discovering substances that would ensure longevity. An example of the reasoning employed offers a stark comparison to Descartes' methods. What was the most desirable and beautiful metal? Gold. As the best and nicest stuff in the world, gold obviously had to be a perfect blend of the four elements, combined in perfect proportions. Obviously, therefore, baser metals needed only to have their constituent elements rearranged into perfect proportions, and they would become gold. Moreover, as a perfect compound, it was obvious that gold had to be a perfect medicine too; taken in a liquid form it would surely cure all ills. Thus did greed and folly lead to bad thinking.

  Apart from the "natural motions" of the earth and water downwards, and of air and fire upwards, all motion had to be the result of a mover giving things a push, just as a human being moves a ball by kicking or throwing it. If pushing stopped, things would cease to move (there was no grasp of the idea of inertia in this science). This was why there had to be a God, to get everything going, and indeed to keep it going, since obviously neither man nor any other finite being was pushing the tides or the moon or the sun or the wind.

  The stars and planets were conceived as revolving around the stationary earth, carried along in crystal spheres that had been set going by God (and were kept going, some theorists said, by "Intelligences," superior angels charged with maintaining their correct orbits). The moon, the lowest and basest of the heavenly bodies, was therefore closest, its sphere being fastest-moving of them all. The next spheres in order of ascent were Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, each sphere moving more slowly than the one beneath it. These bodies were said to be composed of a "quintessence"-—a fifth element—and they moved in perfect circles around the earth, and were perfect, unchanging and incorruptible. They poured out divine music as they moved, which we cannot hear while clothed in our vestments of clay, but which we will hear when we have gone to heaven.

  And so the theory proceeded, through the medico-psychological theory of humours in the human body to the astrological influence of the heavenly bodies on human character and fate, and thence to the theory of the divine ordering of the world of men from anointed kingship to lowly serfdom. This last was the theory of "degree," starting with God at the top and reaching the worm at the bottom, but with man as the connecting creature between angels and beasts, between the realms of heaven and earth. The theory was not without its subtleties; even though angels excelled men in knowledge, men excelled angels in the capacity to learn; even though men excelled beasts in wisdom, yet beasts excelled men in strength; and so on. The theory of degree admirably suited those who invented it, of course, these being the people at or near the top of the ladder.

  Such was the world, and the beliefs, and the science, which for an accumulation of centuries had shaped the outlook even of the most educated men, until the beginning of the seventeenth century and beyond. Imagine what it must have felt like to believe all this, and then to be confronted with a novelty such as, say, the Copernican theory, which turned everything upside down. Not all the details of the traditional view furnished the minds of those such as Voetius and Revius, but most of them did; and certainly enough for them to be affronted—and more than affronted: shocked, and even threatened— by Descartes' outlook and his way of thinking, both of which they found dramatically alien. And to see how alien the new Cartesian view must have appeared to them, one need only reflect on the startling fact that Descartes assumed very little from the traditional outlook, used hardly any of it, invoked hardly any of it, quoted none of it, and respected none of the people who relied on it, but instead actively and swingeingly rejected it as a framework for thought.17 He adhered to just two of its principles, thinking that these were anyway so obvious that they could scarcely be regarded as distinctive components of the traditional view: one was mind-matter duality, the other was the belief that there can be no such thing as a vacuum. It was, as noted, his explicit aim to sweep traditional Aristotelian "science" and metaphysics from the board, and to replace them with a clean, rational, jargon-free, mathematically supported, self-standing, crisply argued, fresh look at the nature of things—and he was sincere in his belief that this did not controvert basic theological commitments, but was consistent with them. Interestingly, the two main concepts he did not reject—dualism and the principle that nature abhors a vacuum—were two of the major weaknesses in his position.

  10

  The Princess of the Passions

  No doubt the preceding chapter gives the impression that Descartes did nothing during the 1640s but engage in violent altercations over the reception of his views in the Dutch universities. True enough, these excitements absorbed a good deal of his time; but more of it was devoted to other major matters. One of them was the completion of the task of getting his principal ideas into published form; after the Meditations he wrote out his science and published it under the title The Principles of Philosophy. Another was the fostering of a valuable friendship he had formed with the highly intelligent daughter of an old enemy; the daughter was Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, and her father (by then dead) had been none other than the Winter King, Frederick, Elector Palatine, whose army Descartes had, in his small and obscure way, helped to beat at the White Mountain a quarter of a century before.

  A third matter was France, and Descartes' growing sense that it was once again a safe place for him, and that he was now entitled to some reward for his eminence in the fields of science and philosophy— an official post, a title, a pension, something that would mark his place in the firmament. With this at least partly in mind he visited his native land for the first time in many years—all the
old reasons for not doing so had since vanished; the war in Europe was drawing to an exhausted close, and people he might not have wished to see were no longer in the way; and moreover, something tantalising had been suggested, which he needed to pursue in person.

  Descartes' friendship with Princess Elizabeth curiously brings the White Mountain back into view. The epochal event of the battle on its shallow slopes—it is a modest hill, in reality—had something mysteriously to do with Descartes' early adult life, with his military service and travels, his putative spying and association with Rosicrucian thought, his involvement in some capacity with the brutal reduction of Bohemia and Moravia, during which the Protestants of those regions were forced back into the Catholic fold at the point of a sword.

  There are preciously few references in Descartes' writings, letters or recorded conversations which allude to those traumatic events, or to anything to do with his experience of war, the military, or the regions of battle he visited. It makes one wonder whether his attentive friendship towards Elizabeth of Bohemia had something more in it than is ever said: a kind of recompense or restitution, a sense of debt towards someone whose straitened circumstances, living in exile in the Hague on the generosity of the House of Orange, was the result of something that he had been party to. Certainly, his friendship with Elizabeth was not a matter of toadying or snobbery, of social climbing or a desire to cut a figure among chandeliers and silver tureens. Descartes was by no means above such things, although he professed to dislike the idea of the time-wasting aspects of court life—a profession that rings hollow in the light of his actions later—but the letters between him and Elizabeth were not about this sort of thing at all. They record a meeting of minds between a thinker and an intelligent woman, and some of the best of Descartes arises from it.