P R A E S I D I U M

A quarterly publication of The Center for Literate Values

Board of Directors:

John R. Harris, Ph.D. (President)

Thomas F. Bertonneau, Ph.D. (Secretary)

Helen R. Andretta, Ph.D.; York College-CUNY

Ralph S. Carlson, Ph.D.; Azusa Pacific University

Kelly Ann Hampton

Michael H. Lythgoe, Lt. Col. USAF (Rtd.)

The previous issue of Praesidium (Winter 2003) may be viewed by

  clicking here.

©  All contents of this journal (including poems, articles, fictional works, and short pieces by staff) are copyrighted by The Center for Moral Reason of Tyler, Texas (2003), and may not be cited at length or reproduced without The Center's express permission.

Pensée de la Saison

Cuivis potest accidere quod cuiquam potest (Publilius Syrus)...

"What happens to anyone can happen to everyone."

CONTENTS

A Few Words from the Editor

As the habit of reading vanishes, our grasp of basic realities weakens and our taste grows robotic.

Kicking the Stone and Viewing the Icon: Realist Epistemology Between Heaven and Earth

Jonathan Chaves

Daggerpoints and Loggerheads: A Sad Time’s Taste for Perverse Oppositions

John R. Harris

"Some Mornings on the DMZ" and Other Poems

R.S. Carlson

War of the Worlds: Post-Literate Reporting Meets the Ugliness of Truth

Peter Singleton

Spontaneous Overflow

Star-Mangled Banner

Staff

Saddam’s statues have all been toppled: it remains to be seen if flashing marquees will take their place.

Footprints in the Snow of the Moon,

Chapter Six (excerpt from novel)

Common Sense Strikes Out

Staff

What does Ty Cobb have to do with Antonio Azorín? Hint: human folly knoweth no boundaries.

back to Contents

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Kicking the Stone and Viewing the Icon: Realist Epistemology Between Heaven and Earth

"It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are."        Father Brown in G.K. Chesterton, "The Oracle of the Dog" (1926)

… whoever denies the existence of truth grants that truth does not exist: and, if truth does not exist, then the proposition "Truth does not exist" is true: and if there is anything true, there must be truth.1

The enthusiasm for abstract truth is an exceedingly fine thing, so long as the truth, which is the object of the enthusiasm, is so completely abstract as to be altogether out of the reach of human faculties; and in that sense, I have myself an enthusiasm for truth, but in no other, for the pleasure of metaphysical investigation lies in the means, not in the end; and if the end could be found, the pleasure of the means would cease.2

because he couldn’t talk, you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords; a something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative. People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.3

You swore you were hard-shelled materialists, and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything. There are thousands balanced on it today; but it's a sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on. You won’t rest till you believe something; that’s why Mr. Vandam went through new religions with a tooth-comb...4

True, the modern era has represented itself in large measure as purely rational. But Richard Weaver, in Ideas Have Consequences (1948), is able to speak of nothing less than a "distrust of reason with which our age seems fatally stricken",5 and to state further that "our surrender to irrationality has been in progress for a long time."6 He even goes so far as to maintain that the "very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper",7 this because "the soul of modern man craves orgiastic disorder."8 Thus the "philosophic position of modernism" is in fact "the sheerest relativism".9 Here is a perfect analysis of the mind of so-called postmodern man, yet written in 1948 and revealingly using the only correct, meaningful terms, "modern", "modernism".

But to reach the inevitable conclusion that the "modernism" spoken of by the "postmodernists" is in fact a straw man constructed by them for the mere polemical purpose of later deconstructing (i.e., destroying) it, it is not necessary to depend on the deep insights of men like Chesterton or Weaver who were able, almost miraculously, to stand apart from their times and to see them clearly. In 1924, as Chesterton was producing the stories that would be published in The Incredulity of Father Brown, André Breton issued his Manifesto of Surrealism calling for "pure psychic automism" in writing (and even then, not with complete originality, if one recalls Rimbaud’s dérangement des sens).10 Here is an explicit call in the realm of elite culture for the very "orgiastic disorder" which, instead of Olympian rationality, actually lurks at the bottom of the modern soul, as Weaver correctly noted, and which will, starting in the 1960’s, dramatically explode in the realm of popular culture as well.

"The term ‘post-modern’ is an empty label," writes Thomas Molnar in 1994.11 "It reassures those who have come to dislike modernity for the right or wrong reason, and hope they may go forward... to something better: modernity preserved, but adding resacralization." But this is a most unlikely outcome, because, as Molnar brilliantly observes, "All this is part of the modernist scenario, the rebellion against being." And the denial of being is a false path toward the sacred.

We must not overlook the fact that in the vocabulary of modernism, "pious" is a term of reproach or ridicule… [M]odernism encourages the exact opposite of this, which is rebellious-ness; and rebellion, as the legend of the Fall tells us, comes from pride. Pride and impatience, these are the ingredients of that contumely which denies substance because substance stands in the way.12

Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. If I could have allowed myself to gratify my vanity at the expense of truth, what fame might I have acquired. Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote.13

Locke... declared the mind a tabula rasa and postulated the radical priority of sensations. Anyone aware of the difference between sensations felt by the subject and things, or objects, that give rise to sensations, will easily realize that Locke’s starting point was merely a dialectical rewording of the Cartesian stance. The reasoning of Locke could provide no more assurance about the existence of things supposedly activating the senses acting on the mind than could the system of Descartes make appear plausible the mind’s grasp of sensations, let alone of things.14

Arguing more elaborately, but reaching a parallel conclusion, Emmet Kennedy, at a recent symposium on "The Enlightenment and Postmodernism" held at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, noted that "the Scientific Revolution focussed more and more on properties, operations and relations [rather] than essences. Thus Locke writes in Bk. III: ‘Our faculties carry us no further toward the knowledge and distinction of substances, than a collection of those sensible ideas which we observe in them….’ This is not to say that Locke dissolves substances into properties. He believes in substances, but does not believe we can know them in themselves. All we know of them is how they affect us."15

The dominating trend of the philosophical interpretation of modern science was set by Bohr.… The hallmark of [his] pragmatism was the resolute avoidance of any question about reality as such. That in atomic physics the wave and particle aspects were equally useful... was certainly true. But was this a justification for Bohr’s warnings against questions concerning reality and what is always implied by it, causality?16

one thing cannot be made out of something else ad infinitum; as, for example, flesh out of earth, earth out of air, air out of fire, and so on without ever stopping.… Nor... can there be an infinite process downward from a start in something higher; as if, for instance, water were made from fire, earth from water and so forever something new being produced…. [T]he final cause is an end and the sort of end that exists not for the sake of something else but all other things exist for it. So, if there is a final cause of this kind, the process of change and becoming will not be infinite.17

At what point, then, were these aspects rejected, leaving us unprepared to account fully for being? This is a question which can be, and has been, argued endlessly. Aristotle himself calls attention to "those who insist on the infinite series [of elements constituting matter, who] do not realize that they are destroying the nature of the good. No man would start to do anything, if he did not expect to reach some end. Nor would there be any intelligence in the universe…."18 Would these have been the Sophists, ancient forerunners of Johnson’s vain men, or Richard Weaver’s modern cravers of "orgiastic disorder"? Could it be that the unmistakable modern fascination with the Neo-Heraclitan view that "all is change" is a recurrence of this ancient, perennial willfulness, based on the false premise that if nothing is fixed, we are limitlessly free? Is "destroying the nature of the good" precisely the point?

Many would prefer to see the watershed as being the Enlightenment, as implied by Kennedy and Jaki. Or should we be schooled by Weaver’s famous argument that it was the triumph of Nominalism over Realism in the 14th century? The key figure here was, of course, William of Ockham (before 1300-c.1349-50), who maintained (in the paraphrase of Gilson), that "the Ideas are ideas of individuals, not of species, because only singulars are producible outside of the mind…. [T]here are no Ideas of genera, differences nor of any other universals. Manifestly, since an infinity of things are producible by God, he has an infinity of Ideas of this infinity of singulars."19

The most tempting of all the false first principles is: that thought, not being, is involved in all my representations. Here lies the initial option between idealism and realism, which will settle once and for all the future course of our philosophy, and make it a failure or a success.… Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good, and who enjoys them as beautiful.… [S]ince being is the first principle of all human knowledge, it is a fortiori the first principle of all metaphysics. [Gilson’s emphasis]20

Gilson speaks here as himself a leading modern advocate of Realist metaphysics; Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), in his book on Aquinas, goes even further and claims that we are compelled "in the last analysis to choose between the two terms of this alternative: integral realism in the sense of Saint Thomas [Aquinas], or pure irrationality."21

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it,--"I refute it thus." This was a stout exemplification of the first truths... without admitting which, we can no more argue in metaphysics than we can argue in mathematicks without axioms.22

When Spinoza said, "The Scholastics start from things, Descartes from thought,"23 he was correctly identifying with his words the same starting point for Realist metaphysics that Johnson identifies with his foot: the real objects of the physical world. Boswell himself too deserves credit for noting, possibly for the first time in history, the extraordinary dilemma of nearly all modern intellectuals who in fact act as if they were Realists—and perhaps actually are Realists by intuition—but feel disarmed from any advocacy for Realism by the apparent impossibility of refuting Nominalist-Idealist arguments. (Beneath even this, of course, may further lie an actual craving for the Void, an aspect that will become more apparent in the course of later centuries.)

Thomas Love Peacock, as we have seen, at least attempts to use the weapons, if not of actual metaphysical argumentation, then at least of satiric humor, to parody views which, like Johnson, he finds absurd. Johnson himself had already applied humor to the case when, in 1780, "being in company with a gentleman who thought fit to maintain Dr. Berkeley’s ingenious philosophy, that nothing exists but as perceived by some mind; when the gentleman was going away, Johnson said to him, ‘Pray, Sir, don’t leave us; for we may perhaps forget to think of you, and then you will cease to exist.’"24 Peacock’s Mr. Flosky, whom we have already met and seen to be based on Coleridge conflated with Kant, maintains that

But after continuing in the same vein for a while longer, "Mr. Flosky suddenly stopped: he found himself unintentionally trespassing within the limits of common sense."25

Thus, going further than Boswell, Peacock recognizes that even the actual thinkers who maintain epistemological pessimism as regards "the material world" cannot help but betray their own professed philosophy at times, even in the process of argumentation. It may well be "common sense" that the mind can create its own happiness or unhappiness, which are indeed at least in part states of mind; but the leap to asserting the irreality of the physical world is a false one. Flosky, good modern philosopher that he is, would not be caught dead articulating mere "common sense"; like the true Gnostic, he will only uphold doctrines whose arcane truth is inaccessible to the "common" folk. His counterpart, Mr. Skionar, also a parody of Coleridge/Kant, in Peacock’s later Crotchet Castle (1831), defines "transcendentalism" as "The philosophy of intuition, the development of universal conviction; truths which are inherent in the organization of the mind, which cannot be obliterated, though they may be obscured, by superstitious prejudice on the one hand, and by the Aristotelian logic on the other."26 Peacock, evidently an adherent of the "common sense" which, as Maritain argues, is entirely consistent with Thomist metaphysics ("The fundamental rectitude of common sense... is wounded by these errors [of agnosticism, naturalism, and ‘angelism’]")27—although Peacock himself may not have realized this—sees the Transcendentalist-Idealists, inheritors of the Nominalist fallacy, as laying claim to some mysterious higher truth which stands at odds with "superstition" (i.e., undoubtedly the dogma of the Church) on the one hand, and "Aristotelian logic" on the other; they apparently yearn for some sort of non-dogmatic spirituality bearing no discernable relationship to the world around us but rather grounded in the mind. Peacock has, in fact, intuited avant la lettre the answer to the remarkable paradox of the co-existence in modern thought of radical subjectivism and a monistic yearning for undifferentiated wholeness.

It is only later in the 19th century, however, that we witness the first heroic attempt to define an optimistic, Realist epistemology for the modern age in the form of what might be described as an epistemological or, better, metaphysical apologia, John Henry Newman’s An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent, published in 1870.28

Newman starts from the point already expressed in the negative by Boswell: "[W]e are satisfied [Berkeley’s] doctrine is not true," even though we can find no way to refute it logically. Newman puts the case in the positive sense when he writes, "Assent on reasonings not demonstrative is too widely recognized an act to be irrational, unless man's nature is irrational… nor has any philosophical theory the power to force on us a rule which will not work for a day."29 He notes that even Locke, one of the architects of Enlightenment thought, acknowledged that "most of the propositions we think, reason, discourse, nay, act upon, are such as we cannot have undoubted knowledge of their truth; yet some of them border so near upon certainty, that we make no doubt at all about them, but assent to them as firmly, and act according to that assent as resolutely as if they were infallibly demonstrated." Thus, Newman states, Locke "affirms and sanctions the very paradox to which I am committed myself."30 He explicitly suggests that even contemporary Nominalist philosophers "have themselves as little misgiving about the truths which they pretend to weigh out and measure, as their unsophisticated neighbors; but they think it a duty to remind us, that since the full etiquette of logical requirements has not been satisfied, we must believe those truths at our peril."31

Here, then, is a full description of one of the key causes of the modern triumph of Nominalism: it is not that our philosophers actually doubt the reality of the world, but rather that they feel duty-bound as sophisticated thinkers to withhold assertion of any truth that cannot be absolutely proved, an attitude inherited apparently from Kant, Descartes, and ultimately the ancient Sophists. It is this that prevents our philosophers from formally asserting as epistemological axioms what they and we are in fact certain to be the case: to use just a few of Newman’s excellent examples, "that there are really existing cities on definite sites, which go by the names of London, Paris, Florence and Madrid," "that Great Britain is an island," which we are certain of even though we personally have never seen it as a whole (one might update this example by citing a contemporary one—that men have landed on the moon, which we accept absolutely even though we were not personal eye witnesses to the event); and that certain propositions are equally false, as "that we had no parents," something we reject out of hand "though we have no memory of our birth; that we shall never depart this life," which we equally deny "though we can have no experience of the future."32 In the case of a full-blown Nominalist such as Bishop Berkeley, of course, universal scepticism, contradicting our actual deep certainty, moves beyond Ockham and extends to the point of doubting the reality of objects (Ockham’s "singulars") that we do in fact directly sense.

Newman summarizes or epitomizes the case in one of his most memorable bons mots: "Proof is the limit of converging possibilities."33

Newman posits, as the faculty in the human mind which renders possible this kind of reasoning, the "Illiative Sense, or right judgment in ratiocination," a "faculty [which sometimes] is nothing short of genius. Such seems to have been Newton’s perception of truths mathematical and physical, though proof was absent."34 (Note, by the way, how Newman correctly uses the noun "perception" here to mean the act of becoming aware of something which is in fact objectively real, as opposed to the increasingly common subjectivist use of the word today, under the influence of Nominalist/ Idealist relativism, to mean little more than "opinion" or "view of".)

In speaking of an "Illiative Sense", Newman would seem to be rehabilitating the ancient concept of a "higher reason", a faculty which renders man capable of the direct, true perception of things. Now, in answer to the question, "Whether the Higher and Lower Reason are Distinct Powers?" Aquinas responds, "Augustine says (De Trin. xii.4) that the higher and lower reason are only distinct by their functions. Therefore they are not two powers."35 But even distinguishing by function significantly expands the conception of human reason, derived from Aristotle, by comparison with the Enlightenment conception that now prevails. By "lower reason", Aquinas apparently means the ability to draw logical conclusions from premises: "through one thing understood, other things come to be understood, as from terms are made propositions, and from first principles, conclusions…. [T]hus it [the human intellect] necessarily compares one thing with another by composition and division; and from one composition and division it proceeds to another, which is the process of reasoning."36 This, of course, is the entirety of what the faculty of reason is essentially understood to do in the Enlightenment and after. But Aquinas recognizes a higher function in reason, by which "the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types... By the seal of the Divine light in us, all things are made known to us."37

Aquinas’s most important statement on epistemology, and therefore the essential foundation for any restructuring of Realist metaphysics as it pertains to our knowledge of this world, is contained in Pt.1, Q.84 Art. 6, "Whether Intellectual Knowledge is Derived from Sensible Things?"38 The short answer is, "Yes," and Spinoza was therefore absolutely correct in stating that "the Scholastics start from things." In this brilliant and crucially important Article, Aquinas recognizes what might be described as an epistemological spectrum from pure materialism to pure idealism. At the materialist end lies Democritus, who "held that knowledge is caused by a discharge of images," according to Aristotle as quoted by Aquinas, who goes on to specify that "Democritus maintained that every operation is by way of a discharge of atoms." Here we have an epistemology with which latter-day materialists—Hume, Marx, or even Bohr (if we add "quanta" to the atoms of Democritus)—would be quite comfortable. At the other end of the spectrum lies Plato, who "held that intellectual knowledge is not brought about by sensible things affecting the intellect, but by separate intelligible forms [i.e., the Ideas] being participated by the intellect." Here is the seed of an Idealist epistemology that might one day sprout into the philosophy of a Descartes, a Kant, or a Croce.

But Aristotle, says Aquinas, "chose a middle course". He agreed with Plato that intellect is immaterial, and must be differentiated from "sense", "But he held that the sense has not its proper operation without the co-operation of the body; so that to feel is not an act of the soul alone, but of the composite [of soul-and-body]." And so Aristotle agreed with Democritus that "the operations of the sensitive part are caused by the impressions of the sensible on the sense... by some kind of operation." This leads in turn to the stage at which the "active intellect" "causes the phantasms received from the senses to be actually intelligible, by a process of abstraction." Thus "sensible knowledge" is the "material cause" of intellectual knowledge, but participation in the eternal types is necessary to abstract from our knowledge of singulars. "Knowledge of the singular and individual is prior, as regards us [i.e., our personal experience of the world in space and time], to the knowledge of the universal; as sensible knowledge is prior to intellectual knowledge. But in both sense and intellect [i.e., as faculties or powers] the knowledge of the more common precedes the knowledge of the less common."39

for him [i.e., Aquinas] the point is always that Man is not a balloon going up into the sky, nor a mole burrowing merely in the earth; but rather a thing like a tree, whose roots are fed from the earth, while its highest branches seem to rise almost to the stars.40

 

The Realist metaphysician is thus able to assert the reality of the world and the essential accuracy of our perception of it, and therefore to uphold with confidence the use of our reason in worldly matters. But the Realist does not limit reason to the world. He recognizes as well "The use of it in Divine matters," the subtitle of a poem called "Reason" by the "metaphysical" poet, Abraham Cowley (1618-67; this use of the term "metaphysical" was initiated by Dr. Johnson in his famous biography of Cowley). The final stanza of this poem presents a view of reason entirely consistent with that of Aquinas:

Though Reason cannot through Faiths Myst’eries see,

It sees that There and such they be;

Leads to Heav’ens Door, and there does humbly keep,

And there through Chinks and Key-holes peep.

Though it, like Moses, by a sad command

Must not come in to th’ Holy Land,

Yet thither it infallibly does Guid,

And from afar ‘tis all Descry’d.41

Cowley’s statement that Reason "leads to Heav’ens Door" neatly captures what for centuries was the mainstream view of the epistemological sequence leading from Creation to Creator, which would eventually come to be developed into the "argument from design." The articulation of this concept may be traced back to the thirteenth chapter of Wisdom,42 one of the "apocrypha" written, according to Robert H. Pfeiffer, "during the last two centuries before the Christian era,"43 and accepted as canonical by both the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church (formalized at the Council of Trent). The primary purpose of Ch. XIII is to argue the foolishness of idolaters, those who, as St. Paul will put it, "worship and serve the creature more than the Creator" (Rom. 1.25), or, even worse, worship dead images of wood or stone:

of the brightness that is above. . .44

It is man’s "rational nature" that "shall sing out/that he [God] is the great king, the good father," according to Gregory’s first "Hymn".45

When released from this life and this impeded vision… I greatly long to have a purer vision of the stable things. Then, not as formerly, they will be unadulterated by association with obscure images which can set the vision of the keenest mind astray. With the eye of a mind made pure I shall gaze upon truth itself. But all that is still to be.…46

Gregory’s most extensive presentation of what might be termed his epistemological standpoint is in his important "Second Theological Oration".47 Arthur James Mason summarizes the argument of this work as follows:

the nature of God is beyond the power of man to understand. We may assuredly know by the study of the world around us that God is, but we cannot find out what He is. We can arrive at negative truths concerning Him, that He is incorporeal and the like, but not at any adequate positive conception.…48

The works of God are beyond our present comprehension, much more Himself; we can only affirm for certain that He exists…. Of His existence the order of nature assures us. We are forced to think of a Creator when we look upon Creation, as the sight of a lyre makes us think of the lyre-maker…. It is... very unreasonable not to accept the natural proofs of God’s existence, and in following them we are compelled to form certain great outlines of a conception of God (e.g., creative power, rational method, etc.), which we cannot doubt to be correct…. To begin with, God cannot be corporeal: which would involve being dissoluble.… We thus reach a negative truth about God... Intelligence "enters in with the things" [μετά τών πραγμάτων είσέρχεται] around us, because we learn by them…. [I]t [intelligence] is "in partnership with sense," though capable of withdrawing itself from the senses.49

The Apostle says: The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made (Rom. i.20). But this would not be unless the existence of God could be demonstrated through the things that are made; for the first thing we must know of anything is, whether it exists.50

We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best results. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.51

Epistemologically, then, "by way of discovery, we come through knowledge of temporal things to that of things eternal."52 But this knowledge—and here Aquinas is again consistent with Gregory—must remain imperfect in this world. In tackling directly the question, "Whether Our Intellect Can Understand Immaterial Substances through Its Knowledge of Material Things?" Aquinas responds,

From material things we can rise to some kind of knowledge of immaterial things, but not to the perfect knowledge thereof…. Science treats of higher things principally by way of negation…. [I]mmaterial substances [cannot be] known by us in such a way as to make us know their quiddity; but we may have a scientific knowledge of them by way of negation and by their relation to material things…. Hence through the likeness derived from material things we can know something positive concerning the angels, according to some common notion, though not according to the specific nature. . .53

In the case of God Himself, however, rational nature alone can reach only negative knowledge by "remotion" (or apophatic theology54); "To see the essence of God is possible to the created intellect by grace, and not by nature," and this only after having become "separated from this mortal life."55

To encounter a second and opposite mode of epistemological access to knowledge of God, it is necessary to make the leap from the realm of philosophical metaphysics to that of pure theology. This, of course, is God’s revelation of Himself to man. A key passage, one which, as Gilson puts it, "runs through the whole history of Christian thought,"56 is Exodus 3.14, in which God, in response to Moses’s question as to the name of the one who is sending him to the children of Israel in Egypt, reveals His name to Moses: "And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." The Greek of the Septuagint version, as translated by Sir Lancelot Charles Brenton, reads,

And God spoke to Moses saying, I am THE BEING [ό ΄Ών]; and he said, Thus shall ye say to the children of Israel, THE BEING has sent me to you.57

The God who "is" [Ex. 3.14] transcends everything by virtue of his power. He is the substantive Cause and maker of being, subsistence, of existence, of substance, and of nature. He is the Source and the measure of the ages. He is the reality beneath time and the eternity behind being….58

In some of his phrasing, Pseudo-Dionysius comes very close indeed to sounding more Neo-Platonic, in the mode of Plotinus (205-70), than Christian, a fact which has led to elaborate discussions of his orthodoxy. Gilson brilliantly distinguishes the identification of the One (i.e., God) with Being in Augustine—and Christian thought in general—from the subordination of being to an abstract One, as in Plotinus,59 and Pseudo-Dionysius in this passage certainly seems to imply that God transcends being itself. But this is probably best interpreted as the enthusiasm of the mystic, rather than a calculated position taken by a systematic theologian; generally speaking, Pseudo-Dionysius succeeds in establishing on the basis of Ex. 3.14 that God is the ground of being or rather Being itself.

it signifies present [as opposed to past or future] existence; and this above all properly applies to God, whose existence knows not past or future, as Augustine says (De Trin. v).60

When the risen Christ appeared before the sceptic Thomas—a "postmodernist", perhaps, in "premodernist" times—and allowed the doubter to place his fingers in His wound, upon Thomas’s finally exclaiming, "My Lord and my God," "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20.27-29). Raising the question of the relationship between sight (direct sense perception) and belief for modern man, Newman writes, "Can I believe as if I saw? Since such a high assent requires a present experience or memory of the fact, at first sight it would seem as if the answer must be in the negative; for... no one in this life can see God" (John 1.18).61

If you say that only intellectual worship is worthy of God, then take away all corporeal things: lights, the fragrance of incense, prayer made with the voice. Do away with the divine mysteries which are fulfilled through matter: bread, wine, the oil of chrism, the sign of the cross. All these things are matter…. Matter is filled with divine grace through prayer addressed to those portrayed in images…. The apostles saw the Lord with bodily eyes; others saw the apostles, and others the martyrs. I too desire to see them both spiritually and physically and receive the remedy by which the ills of both soul and body (for I am composed of both) may be healed.62

[V]isible things are corporeal models which provide a vague understanding of intangible things…. Anyone would say that our inability immediately to direct our thoughts to contemplation of higher things makes it necessary that familiar everyday media be utilized to give suitable form to what is formless, and make visible what cannot be depicted, so that we are able to construct understandable analogies. If, therefore, the Word of God, in providing for our every need, always presents to us what is intangible by clothing it with form, does it not accomplish this by making an image using what is common to nature and so brings within our reach that for which we long but are unable to see? A certain perception takes place in the brain, prompted by the bodily senses, which is then transmitted to the faculties of discernment, and adds to the treasury of knowledge something that was not there before. The eloquent Gregory says that the mind which is determined to ignore corporeal things will find itself weakened and frustrated [a reference to Th. Or. 2]. Since the creation of the world the invisible things of God are clearly seen [Rom. 1.20] by means of images. We see images in the creation which, although they are only dim lights, still remind us of God. For instance, when we speak of the holy and eternal Trinity, we use the images of the sun, light, and burning rays….63

[W]e make images of every form we see, and our apprehension of these forms is a kind of sight. If we sometimes understand forms by using our minds, but other times from what we see, then it is through these two ways that we are brought to understanding. It is the same with the other senses: after we have smelled or tasted, or touched, we combine our experience with reason, and thus come to knowledge.64

St. John identifies and analyzes no less than six types of images, of which the first is the "natural image", and states that "the Son of the Father is the first natural and precisely similar image of the invisible God, for He reveals the Father in His own person…. He is the image of the invisible God [Col. 1.15]…."65

The commandment, "Thou shalt not make thee any graven image" (Deut. 5.8), John plausibly takes as a prohibition against making images of false gods or natural bodies such as the sun for the purpose of idolatrous worship (already the concern, as we have seen, of Wisdom 13). He points out that God Himself commands that the tabernacle be made with "two cherubim of gold" which "shall stretch forth their wings on high... and their faces shall look one to another... cherubim of cunning work" (Ex. 25.18, 20; 26.1).66 These are certainly not the words of a God utterly opposed to the making of legitimate images of actual heavenly beings. St. John therefore concludes that because in Christ God did assume flesh and become man, the act of depicting Christ, at least—the Father remaining beyond the reach of such depiction—in paint, gold-leaf and wood replicates the actual Incarnation, the mysterious taking on of matter by spirit.67

To the later objection that the image "may not have the same form as the prototype because of insufficient artistic skill [i.e., an objection on the grounds of insufficient "realism" in the conventional sense of the word]," St. Theodore the Studite will respond that "veneration is given to the image not insofar as it falls short of similarity, but insofar as it resembles its prototype. In this degree the image has the same form as the prototype; and the objects of veneration are not two, but one and the same, the prototype in the image."68 Here St. Theodore uses the term "form" in an essentially Aristotelian manner, centuries before Aquinas. He displays the characteristic epistemological optimism of the true metaphysical Realist (the epistemological cup is half full, not half empty), and he extends this insight by maintaining that "the same form is in all the representations though they are made with different materials."69 That form "in the image" is "Christ plainly visible as its prototype."70 Hence the worshipper viewing the icon and praying as he does so is in fact seeing and worshipping the very image of God, as the apostles saw His image in the Person of the living God-man, Christ [cf. John 14.8-9].

It is therefore entirely appropriate that, circum-scribed by the halo of many Byzantine icons of Christ, either as child or as man, is a cross inscribed with the very words of the name revealed to Moses by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: ό ΄Ών , "The Being."

It is because Eastern Orthodox Christianity inherited this theological tradition that icons become such important windows affording through the medium of matter a glimpse of the immaterial world, heavenly doors through which we are able not merely to "peep" (as in Cowley’s poem) but to gaze upon the visage of the divine, as if "endowed with life”. This phrase (Greek 'έmyucoV, lit. "ensouled") is in fact used by the 11th century Byzantine writer, Michael Psellos, in his extraordinary ecphrastic homily on a pictorial representation of the Crucifixion.71 Psellos knows that his auditors have not (in the translation of Elizabeth A. Fisher) "altogether risen above the body, but you long to gaze upon him [Christ] with your very eyes and to see, if possible, Christ himself hanging naked upon the tree…." Psellos promises to satisfy this yearning by showing his auditors the actual scene, in the form of a painting. But the painting "seems to be the product not of art but of nature," or rather of a collaboration between the craftsman and God Himself:

God inspires with his grace not only creatures but also images which lack life…. These likenesses seem to be the product of the human hand, but God actually fashions them without our knowing it... and presents them in visible form by using the hand of the craftsman as his vehicle for the picture.72

Thus, "The whole image seems to be endowed with life…. [T]he dead body [of Christ] in the picture... will appear endowed with life…. [L]ife exists in the image from two sources, both from artistic skill, which has produced a perfect replica, and also from grace.…"73

For an Orthodox man of our times an icon, whether ancient or modern, is not an object of aesthetic admiration or an object of study; it is living, grace-inspired art which feeds him... for now, as before, it corresponds to a definite concrete reality, a definite living experience, which is at all times alive in the Church.74

 

It is possible to step beyond even the claim that through icons one can see at least an image of God to the even more remarkable claim that one can actually see, in this life, God’s uncreated divine light, if one’s senses are transmuted through the action of the Holy Spirit. Visionary experience of God is described by various mystics in Western Christianity. One thinks of such figures as St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) or Jakob Boehme (1575-1624). In the case of Richard Rolle (c.1300-1349), senses other than that of sight are involved: Rolle feels, hears and tastes divine calor, canor and dulcor (heat, song, sweetness).75

the chosen disciples saw the essential and divine beauty of God on Thabor... not the glory of God which derives from creatures, as you [Barlaam] think, but the superluminous splendour of the beauty of the Archetype; the very formless form of the divine loveliness, which deifies man and makes him worthy of personal converse with God; the very kingdom of God, eternal and endless, the very light beyond intellection and unapproachable, the heavenly and infinite light, out of time and eternal…. They indeed saw the same grace of the Spirit which would later dwell in them; for there is only one grace of the Father, Son and Spirit, and they saw it with their corporeal eyes, but with eyes that had been opened so that, instead of being blind, they could see…. [T]hey contemplated that uncreated light which, even in the age to come, will be ceaselessly visible only to the saints…. [T]hese divine energies are in God and remain invisible to the created faculties[.] Yet the saints see them, because they have transcended themselves with the help of the Spirit. [long emphasis added]76

The light of the Transfiguration of the Lord has no beginning and no end; it remained uncircumscribed (in time and space) and imperceptible to the senses, although it was contemplated... but the disciples of the Lord passed here [at Mt. Tabor] from the flesh into the spirit by a transmutation of their senses…. For the body itself also experiences divine things, when the passionate forces of the soul find themselves not put to death but transformed and sanctified.77

Sometimes... because of their great purity and their struggle, and even because of the special good-will of God, some people become worthy of seeing the Light with their physical eyes—which have been transformed by the divine grace—like the three disciples on Mount Tabor…. We too, after the vision of the Light, feel exceedingly tired….78

In 1953, in an introduction to an English translation of "On the Incarnation" by St. Athanasius, C.S. Lewis cautioned, "It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."79 This is sage advice, and I have tried to maintain at least this proportion in the present paper. The moderns whose names have figured here so far—Chesterton, Weaver, Lewis himself, Gilson, Maritain, Jaki, Molnar—are all of them unquestioned (Neo)-Realists in metaphysics, men who prove themselves capable to a remarkable degree of engaging in what Lewis calls an "experiment in criticism",80 entering empathetically into the worldviews of other ages, and therefore becoming capable of stepping back from their own age and seeing it objectively. Now, if we raise the question, "Does the name of Eric Voegelin (1901-85) belong in this company?" we are faced at once with this problem: Voegelin would have considered Lewis’s "experiment" to be an impossibility. "History," he assures us, "is not a field of indifferently objective materials…. Rather, history is constituted by consciousness."81 Even more definitively, "there is no reality of order in history except the reality experienced and symbolized by the noetic consciousness of the participants."82 Thus one must "renounce all pretense to an observer’s position outside the process [of history]." One must instead "enter the process and... participate both in its formal structure and the concrete tasks imposed on the thinker by his situation in it."83 This is a view of history derivative of Hegel’s transformation of history into a force with a life of its own, adopted by Marx for his purposes, and finally indistinguishable from the "postmodernist" view currently fashionable. It would seem at once to deny the possibility of free will, something Realist metaphysicians always uphold, and to limit the thinker to the perspective of his own age. If the doctrine is true, one wonders how Voegelin himself apparently managed to escape the trap, and to be able to hold forth on the entire sweep of history, when his own philosophy of history would seem to allow no scope for such an endeavor.

But perhaps I have misunderstood Voegelin here. Let us put aside this issue for the sake of argument, and address directly the question at hand. It is claimed by some that Voegelin is in fact a Realist, and not all of these are necessarily his supporters; Molnar records a conversation with a German colleague who, for example, could not "forgive Voegelin... his realism."84 One has the impression that this claim rests on Voegelin’s undoubted acceptance of the reality of the divine. If one were to compare this position of his with the terminal nihilism of our own "postmodernists", Voegelin would indeed have to be seen as a Realist of some sort.

But what emerges if one tests Voegelin, not against "postmodernists"—in comparison with whom nearly anyone could claim to be a Realist—but with actual Realist thinkers, and not merely the Realists of the past, but such modern Neo-Realists as Gilson or Weaver? To begin with, it will have to be admitted that Voegelin’s account of "reality" itself is highly equivocal. "Reality," Voegelin asserts, "is not a thing that man confronts but the encompassing reality in which he himself is real as he participates…. The philosopher [gains] insight in the structure of reality... through participation in its process…. Insight into reality is insight from the perspective of man who participates in reality. The term perspective must not be understood, or rather misunderstood, in a subjective sense. There is not a multitude of perspectives, but only the one perspective that is determined by the place of man in reality."85 Now this is hardly distinguishable from Kant, and it also introduces us to a characteristic problem of argumentation in Voegelin: the self-invalidating claim. It might be epitomized in the form, "I am not a subjectivist, but I see all reality as inextricably bound up with the perceiving subject." Voegelin characteristically recognizes and even analyzes a potential epistemological pitfall, and tries to avoid falling into it by mere assertion of a difference between his view and that from which he wishes to distinguish it. But, alas, he does not adequately differentiate his position from the problematic one he correctly perceives. In the current example, Voegelin beyond doubt ends up falling into the dilemma of Kantian subjectivism as thoroughly as Kant himself.

the impression of a subjectless event in being must not be rejected as a false appearance; that would open the way for psychologization: for sophistic theories concerning the gods as the invention of a ‘clever’ man as well as for Feuerbach’s psychology of the divine as a projection of the soul. On the other hand, one must not hypostasize the impression [emph. added] of being, when it is noetically illuminated, into being as an object; that would deliver being to the libido dominandi of the speculators and activists, and philosophy would derail into speculations of the theogonic or historical-dialectic types.86

Here Voegelin is definitive in his excellently formulated rejection of the reduction of religion to merely psychological phenomena, originated by Feuerbach, and then further developed by Jung—whom Voegelin castigates by implication for "loading" the "collective unconscious" with "archetypes that once upon a time, before the psychologists put them down there, were the conscious symbolizations of metaleptic reality," including myths, each of which Voegelin considers to have "its truth", in a manner reminsiscent of Mircea Eliade87—as well in recent times as Jung’s popularizer, Joseph Campbell. But when he cautions us against "hypostasizing" or reifying "the impression of being" into "being as an object", he reveals that he in fact falls short of the Realist position. The Realists (or Scholastics), as Spinoza clearly stated in a passage already cited, "start from things", and not merely "impressions" of things. To start from the "impression" (or "phenomenon" as opposed to "noumenon") is to acquiesce in the Cartesian-Kantian fallacy which underpins all of modern Nominalism. Realism asserts access to the actual thing, which exists independently of the observing subject.

One senses from this passage that Voegelin may be aware of his problem, but that he feels compelled to reject true Realism because he thinks that it leads to doctrinal theology of the sort practiced by the Church Fathers (here referred to as "speculators... of the theogonic" type), out of which eventually emerge "speculations... of the historical-dialectic type," i.e., Communism and Nazism! More explicitly than here, in The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin credits Karl Jaspers for sensing in "[Christian] orthodoxy", which of course is Realist, "the transformation of existential truth into doctrine of which he recognized the murderous consequences in the practice of Communism and National Socialism."88 We may conclude that Voegelin remained reluctant to assert the reality of the objective world apart from perceiving consciousness at least partially because he thought that such a move historically led to the destructive modern ideologies. That in taking this position he was misconstruing orthodox theology, both in terms of its actual content and in terms of its true role in history, appears evident to me, even though I happen to agree fully with Voegelin’s understanding of the ideologies as deriving from immanentized Christian eschatology. The whole problem here lies in his apparent failure to distinguish between a false interpretation of the eschatology and a true one, as well as from an Hegelian tendency, already noticed, to see the movement of history as inevitable.

If Voegelin is equivocal, for whatever reasons, on objects or things, the true starting points of Realist epistemology, he is equally so on human nature, the soul, and reason, all of which are also foundation stones of Realism. "We casually work with the concept of human nature as if we considered it constant, as did the classics [i.e., the classical philosophers?], or malleable, as do the ideologues."89 But the true Realist does assert the constancy of human nature. Voegelin’s attempt to claim some third conception of human nature seems to be grounded in a Neo-Heraclitan view that all is flux, coupled with a type of evolutionism again reminiscent of Hegel: i.e., human nature is in process of unfolding, rather than given. This leaves the human person with no faculty capable of "experiencing the divine ground"—which is, as we shall see, Voegelin’s epistemological starting point—or anything else, for that matter. "The subject of the experience also is a matter of difficulty," he states, because "the term ‘soul’, or psyche... must not be understood as if it were an object about which one could make philosophical propositions concerning its immateriality or immortality…. Rather it is strictly the name of a predicate of which ‘place of tensions’ is the subject."90 (We might note that making propositions about the soul is precisely what the leading Realist metaphysician, St. Thomas Aquinas, does in his Summa Theologica.) But Voegelin goes right on to recognize that "since neither the temporal being of man nor his experience of eternal being can be doubted, there must be in man something nontemporal…." And this, of course, is precisely the soul! Once again we find Voegelin painting himself into a corner, and trying to have his ontological and epistemological cake and eat it too: he sees the necessity of Realism, but shies away from asserting it.

Thus Voegelin regards reason itself, at least as it exists in the dichotomy of "reason" vs. "revelation", as a construction of theologians calculated to "monopolize the symbol ‘revelation’ for Israelite, Jewish, and Christian theophanies"91 (whereas Voegelin, as shall appear, wants to argue for the theophanic legitimacy of the "experience" of such thinkers as Parmenides). Hence "consciousness is not a constant but a process,"92 a position which, taken in conjunction with the others studied here, puts Voegelin, again, in the dilemma of being unable to posit any component in the human person which could "experience" transcendent truth, and he is left asserting the minimalist claim that "epistemologically, there is no proof of things unseen but again this very faith,"93 a doctrine which is conventional in much of Protestant theology but stands at odds with the far more extensive claims for reason found in true Realist metaphysics.

What, then, is Voegelin? A full-fledged examination of his thought lies beyond the scope of this paper, but some brief impressions may be given at this point. Voegelin actually takes pains to deny that he is "dealing with problems of theology."94 But that is exactly what he is doing. In fact, it is not difficult to extrapolate from Voegelin’s writings a virtual Credo of his basic doctrines, ironically contradicting his view that the articulation of doctrine is a "derailment" of primal spiritual experience—a view, incidentally, characteristic of mystics in all religions throughout history. Actually, it is impossible to assert anything whatsoever on any matter of consequence without at least implying some underlying first principle.

These propositions, articulated in various ways throughout Voegelin’s works, are precisely doctrines, every bit as much as the doctrines promulgated at the Ecumenical Councils which Voegelin thinks somehow "deform[ed]... the experiential insights" they supposedly explained.95

These doctrines establish Voegelin as what might be described as a Neo-Parmenidean or Neo-Platonic monist, deeply influenced by Hegel, in a mode distinguishable from Heidegger only in that he claims to accept Christianity as part of the unfolding self-revelation of the Ground. As an epistemologist he is essentially Kantian. Now, Voegelin would undoubtedly reject any comparison with Heidegger; he speaks contemptuously of "the epigonic Being for whose parousia Heidegger waited in vain."96 But Gilson, in his untranslated but crucially important posthumous work, Constantes philosophiques de l'être ("The Philosophical Constants of Being," 1983), brilliantly characterizes the real problem with Heidegger’s ontological stance:

Parmenides already said, ‘Being is.’ Twenty-five centuries later not only have we not advanced any farther than this, but Heidegger barely dares to go even that far. He does not feel certainty about the proposition das Sein ist ["Being is"]... for the phantom of ‘the being’ is always there, prowling around the `is' as if around its home and anxious to return to it.97

What Gilson sees here is the crucial choice that needs to be made between the abstraction, "Being", and the actually existent entity, "the being", or ό ΄Ών, The Being, The One Who Is, God, a triune person and no abstraction. Voegelin’s formulation, "divine ground of being", is in fact no better than Heidegger’s, and falls short of the God who is the true ground of being in orthodox Christianity as well as in the Realist meta-physics which is its handmaid. Whenever Voegelin speaks of the actual revelation of God, whether to Moses and the prophets or in the Incarnation as the second Person of the Trinity, Christ, he treats these as being mere "symbols" of some higher, ineffable "divine ground". This move—of relegating the revealed God to a position of ultimate subordination to a higher abstraction—is characteristic precisely of Plotinus’s Neo-Platonism, as pointed out by Gilson in a passage already noted (see note 59). (As we have seen, Neo-Platonic subordinationism also tends to be characteristic of Pseudo-Dionysius, not surprisingly one of Voegelin’s most frequently cited Christian theologians, and in fact more a mystic than a systematic theologian.) But in true Realist metaphysics, nothing is higher than the revealed God. Nor is revelation a mere "symbol" or "myth" invented by man to explain some ineffable "experience", but rather actual reality. One is, of course, at full liberty to reject it out of hand; but there can be no having one’s cake and eating it too by accepting it merely as another "symbol" of an ineffable abstraction.

By placing the whole emphasis on a mysterious "experience", Voegelin fails to escape from the solipsism of German Idealism. As Molnar cogently phrases it,98 "the term ‘experience’ is the alibi of German idealists when they wish to avoid speaking of ‘reality’; it is the key to their subjectivism." And in the last analysis, German Idealism is monistic; it is a monism of spirit, rather than of matter, as in Democritus or Marx, but finally monism is monism. Voegelin writes,

the philosopher must... include the truth of the primary experience of a divine-worldly cosmos in his philosophy. For the cosmos may indeed be dissociated into divine and worldly being, by the experience of being, but that dissociating knowledge does not dissolve the bond of being between God and World, which we call cosmos…. [N]either can an immanent world nor a transcendent being "exist"; rather these terms are indices that we assign to areas of reality of the primary experience, as the noetic experience dissociates the cosmos into existing things and their divine ground of being.99

It is this monist position that makes it possible for Voegelin to assert that "the God who appeared to the philosophers, and who elicited from Parmenides that exclamation ‘Is!’, was the same God who revealed himself to Moses as the ‘I am who (or: what) I am.’"100 Similarly, the "force that compels the prisoner in the cave to turn around toward the divine light (Republic)... belong[s] to the same foreground of theophany as the fire that moves Moses to turn towards the thornbush." It is significant that in the key passage, Ex. 3.14, Voegelin amends "who" to "what", thus demonstrating that he is disturbed by the radical personhood of the revealed God, precisely as Gilson shows Heidegger to have been.

This, predictably, makes Voegelin a less reliable interpreter of St. Paul than of any other figure he deals with at length. He speaks of a "phantasy of two realities [which] has remained constant in Western history from antiquity to the present…. Even in the case of Paul we had to note his wavering between acceptance of the one reality in which the Incarnation occurs and indulgence in the metastatic expectation of a second reality to come in the time of the living."101 Even "Resurrection refers to the Pauline vision [emph. added] of the Resurrected."102 In other words, Voegelin equivocates on the reality of the key events of Christianity, the Incarnation and the Resurrection. He is so thorough an Hegelian evolutionist-historicist that even Paul is said to be limited to the "construction" of reality, and this "construction could not be ultimate but would have to be amended with changes and enlargements of the empirical horizon; but, at least, it remained ‘true’ for the better part of two millenniums."103 Note how Voegelin, anticipating the common practice of "postmodernists", puts "true" in quotation marks! No surprise that he considers that "the divine presence itself, though experienced by man who exists in time and space, is not a spatio-temporal given,"104 and has recourse to the evasive concept of the metaxy, instead of grasping the true Christian paradox of Incarnation: spirit (which is one) assuming flesh (which is another) precisely in space-and-time. If Voegelin had taken seriously as good-faith explorations of these matters the writings of such Church Fathers as St. Athanasius or St. Gregory of Nazianzus, instead of dismissing them as "derailers", he might have escaped these misunderstandings, to say nothing of his claim that early Christianity was "substantially ditheistic",105 which breaks not only with patristic theology but with post-Reformation Protestant theology of virtually any description. St. Paul famously declared that "Christ crucified" is "unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks foolishness" (I Cor. 1.23). Voegelin in his analysis of Paul appears to be one of the Greeks: he is scandalized by the radical break between classical cosmologism and orthodox Christianity.

Why should ontological monism be a problem for the Realist metaphysician? Richard Weaver says that if we wish to reassert Realism, "The first positive step must be a driving afresh of the wedge between the material and the transcendental. This is fundamental: without a dualism we should never find purchase for the pull upward…. So long as there is a single breach in monism... the case of values is not lost."106 "Dua