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The Apologetics of Transcendence

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:02:00 -0400

When the anonymous Christian in Nicholas of Cusa’s dialogue “On the Hidden God” is asked by his pagan interlocutor to explain the difference between Christians and pagans, he answers that followers of Christ know they cannot comprehend the divine. This seems a strange mode of apologetics, one particularly unsuited for the age of science. Any strategy that would identify ignorance as a basic element of the Christian faith (indeed, as its specific difference) could hardly counter the claim that science has revealed the basic structures of nature, rendering the “God hypothesis” obsolete.

But Nicholas of Cusa does not advance a nescient faith, and understood correctly, the claim made in this dialogue is well suited to counter atheism’s scientific imperialism. Cusa’s critique of paganism could be brought to bear on the pretensions of scientism by showing that, first, naturalistic accounts cannot in principle achieve more than accidental, partial truths about even the natural world, and second, that the God that Christians worship is not the kind of being that could be crowded out by scientific accounts because of the ontological difference between God and the world.

A scientific law is a stable, enduring image of the world of appearance, in which things busily come to be, suffer change, and pass away. The real subjects of scientific theories”stars, amoebas, electromagnetic fields”fluctuate, but a good scientific theory expresses this flux in stable laws. The scientific truth of the world of appearance is, as Hegel pointed out, both “present in it and . . . its direct tranquil image.” Adherents of scientism hold that, in principle, science can provide an image of the natural world that is complete and exhaustive, even if the limitations of our instruments or our neurology make this a difficult achievement in practice.

The looming problem is that “science” offers no single image of the world, because the scientific enterprise is fragmentary in method, aims, subjects, and concepts. Chemistry, biology, psychology, anthropology, and physics all offer accounts of a human being, and although these accounts overlap in places, the pictures are still distinct: They cannot be reduced to a single scientific image. True, it has long been hoped that all the sciences could be reduced to physics, but this is a matter of sheer faith and has not been supported by the development of physics in the twentieth century.

Yet even if future developments in the sciences vindicate this faith in a unified “theory of everything,” such a theory could never be more than a relative expression of the truth. A comprehensive theoretical framework can never, even in principle, fully account for natural phenomena, because a unified theory must oscillate between abstraction, which does not explain the whole of the natural world, and description (or prediction), which encompasses more of appearance but lacks explanatory power.

Newton’s theory of gravity succeeded in offering an explanation of the movement of bodies because it retreated from much of the phenomenal world, preferring abstraction to empiricism. The movement of a falling apple and the elliptical orbit of Saturn can be explained by the same theory because they are considered abstractly as inert bodies. But the greater the explanatory power, the more aspects of the world “appearance retains for itself,” and the less the theory can explain how an apple is different from a planet.

The first apologetic move Cusa makes is to show that, while naturalistic explanations can be true, they can only be partially true; they cannot, in principle, exclude explanations of another order. Cusa’s second move is to clarify the way in which God can be said to be the absolute Truth of the world”that is, the Logos.

This transition is critical for our current apologetic situation. Cusa does not argue that the existence of natural entities must be explained by a supernatural entity as in William Paley’s natural theology. Truth by its nature must be “prior to every foundation”; it must exceed finite concepts such as being and nothing, effable and ineffable, large and small, same and other. Any discomfort Christians may feel at Cusa’s insistence that God is not an entity and therefore that his existence can only be affirmed analogically, for Cusa, simply evinces the seductive power of paganism.

Cusa explains God’s relation to creation with the analogy of sight and color: God is to the world as sight is to color. Color is color by virtue of sight; without sight there would be only frequencies of light. Sight is in the colored world, yet sight is itself neither a color nor a colored thing. “Color is not apprehended in any way other than by sight; and in order that sight can readily apprehend every color, the center of sight is without color.” Sight transcends the categories of color: it is neither black nor white, red nor blue; just as God is neither an entity nor a non-entity, large nor small, effable nor ineffable. Sight gives life to color while, at the same time, transcending the realm of colored things.

Cusa puts the conclusion of this argument in the mouth of the (rather too easily) converted pagan: “neither God nor his name is found [in the finite world], and . . . God escapes all conception.” It is this God, who is hidden in his very manifestation”and who cannot appear within a naturalistic theory as explanans or explanandum ”to whom Christians must witness.

Thomas Martin Cothran is a writer and attorney living in Lexington, Kentucky .

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Against Faith in Faith

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:01:00 -0400

It has become a strange and unfortunate commonplace that one must have faith in faith”faith, that is, in the ability to commit oneself to truths that transcend rational justification”not only out of respect for faith’s intrinsic (if futile) beauty, but also as a means to the truth. Confronted with inadequate evidence for the deeper truths of life, one must conjure up a commitment to ideas for which the subjective act of faith can be the only ground, and one must believe not only in the content of faith but in the faith-act itself.

This, at least, is the picture of faith one finds in the writings of Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, and it has an embarrassing currency among Christian believers. (For example, a Christian woman once told me earnestly that even if biologists were able to demonstrate common descent to a certainty, she would still reject it for a simplistic interpretation of the Genesis creation account as a matter of faith.)

But Christians can dispense with faith in faith, for this strange recursion stems from a basic misunderstanding of Christian faith. The projection of an opposition between reason and faith”wherein the former claims objectivity and the latter demands assent to a set of propositions that cannot be proven”into the biblical context anachronistically imposes Enlightenment categories where they would not have been intelligible.

Faith, in the Christian life, has nothing to do with a subjective belief that does not admit rational justification (not even Kierkegaard quite said that), because faith begins not with the subject of faith but its object”the Trinitarian life of God. It consists not of assent to some proposition but the entrustment of one’s being to God’s providence. Faith does not originate in the individual believer’s own efforts, but is rather a gift of grace to the believer, usually received in baptism, as one means among many of participating in God’s own life.

Far from posing a threat to one’s faith, knowledge reinforces it: the more reason one has to believe in God’s providence, the more readily the believer entrusts himself to God. Faith likewise facilitates a more intimate knowledge of the plans God has set in store for the believer. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, “faith” in the Bible is often better rendered “faithfulness”; one has faith, therefore, less by belief than by piety. Faith is”at least in the order of time”primarily performative and only secondarily reflective. Recall St. Irenaeus’ dictum: “to believe in God is to do his will.”

The naive concept of faith as blind assent arose from an equally naive and philosophically disreputable theory of knowledge , according to which one knows a thing best by detaching oneself from its use and setting aside personal biases in order to form an idea that corresponds to the thing. The correspondence theory of truth necessarily regards particular “interested” modes of engagement”for example, desire”as inimical to knowledge. Though this theory of knowledge as detached reflection appeals to our cultural prejudices, formed as they are by an unreflective scientism, it is a relatively modern notion that has been thoroughly dismantled by the phenomenological tradition. Knowledge depends on and is conditioned by both our historical-cultural situation and in the context of certain practices. (Of course, this is only novel for the secular philosophical tradition: the historical contingency of knowledge has been recognized in the theological tradition since at least St. Irenaeus, and St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized the importance of bodily practice in his virtue theory.)

The knowledge of faith, rather than relying on the outmoded theories of knowledge where the mind merely represents external objects, is participatory; the act of contemplating the things of God partakes in God’s own Trinitarian activity. The knowledge of faith is not therefore “subjective” in the sense that it happens primarily in the believer, but is “objective” because the believer participates in the eternal activity of the object of faith; the believer’s subjective faith is therefore secondary and derivative.

If the subject cannot escape engagement with the thing to be known, the question remains: what sort of engagement leads to Truth? For the Christian tradition, the answer is faith, hope, and charity, as embodied especially in the Church’s liturgical practices and articulated by her theological tradition.

The tacit participatory metaphysics in which Christian faith becomes intelligible emphasizes that Christianity is not an abstract system or an existential human possibility, but the ontological union of God and man in time and history through the recapitulative activity of the incarnate Word of God. Rebirth, not intellectual assent, takes one up into the life of God, which has descended to us in the flesh. There is more to becoming a Christian than becoming a Marxist (for example): one does not merely become convicted by the truth of a text and then try to convert the world; one must be born into a new life, bodily and spiritually, in baptism. (Hence the common refrain of the Church Fathers: philosophy is always in labor but never able to give birth.)

Faith presupposes a context of certain practices and even bodily transformation”for our flesh is redeemed by Christ’s own flesh”and cannot be considered a general feature of human nature that finds diverse expression in all the great religious traditions. But again, despite faith’s dependency on (renewed) flesh, faith is ordered toward the knowledge of God. Whether in St. Thomas Aquinas’ concept of the beatific vision or St. Gregory of Nyssa’s concept of eternal progress in the knowledge of God, the Christian life finds its highest expression in the contemplation of God.

I don’t intend to limn the structure of faith systematically; the point I wish to make is a modest one. The assault on “faith” as a human constant realized in the different religions in various forms does not threaten anything worth defending. Faith is not a universal feature of human nature. It can appear only within a certain complex network of rites, linguistic habits, rules of conduct, beliefs, and institutions”that is, the historical and embodied existence of the Church. One must attack (or defend) Christian faith where it may actually be found, not in the mind as an idea but as a form of life realized in the historical community established by Jesus Christ.

Thomas Cothran is an attorney who lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

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