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| (1796–1867) |
The context raises the inevitable question of the reasons for the conversion. Certainly the conversion must have been a step toward better inclusion in the French society, and indeed, one of the converts makes the remark that Christianity was already familiar to him from his social circles. Yet, since all three of the converts eventually became priests, they in great probability must have felt a genuine change in their hearts. Indeed, the separation from the Jewish community seems to have been one of great personal anguish to some of the converts, leading even to being ostracised by their former friends and relatives.
Despite these strong personal experiences presented in the book, as a reader I shall try to be impartial and not make any judgement about the respective status of the two religions. Still, since I am expounding the dialogue from the viewpoint of Bautain, it is inevitable that the argument of the Catholic side will have a more prominent role in the discussion.
The book begins from a time when the three future converts are still Jewish youth, but already skeptical about their religion, at least in its current state, which they interpret as putting more emphasis on ritualistic traditions than on true moral improvement. They have also been affected by the deistic arguments, but still feel that deism leaves certain of their needs unsatisfied. Furthermore, they are curious about Christianity, but do not understand the reasoning behind some of its mysteries, like the doctrine of the trinitarian nature of God.
Bautain, on his part, commends the three Jews for their spiritual search – indeed, he suggests that this is something brought about by the very hand of God. He at once warns them not to trust deism, because, he thinks, deism misreads God as being a mere force of nature, with no true personality. Indeed, Bautain is certain that Judaism is a much truer belief system than deism, seeing God as a living entity. Bautain is still convinced that Judaism is not the final truth, having been a mere stepping stone toward the true religion or Christianity. Still, it has been a necessary stepping stone, and Christianity without Judaism, he compares, would be like a statue without a pedestal.
What makes Christianity the ultimate truth, Bautain argues, is the simple fact that it is based on divine revelation given to humanity through words of Moses, prophets, Jesus and apostles and retained and fulfilled by the community of the Catholic church: what more justification would it need? Of course, if one sees in the Church nothing more than a human institution, he admits, this justification falls flat. Yet, Bautain is eager to point to moral development of humankind after the founding of the Church as an indirect proof of the truth of Christianity.
Bautain’s correspondents find flaws in this argument. They find it unsettling that they should just believe that the Church knows the right way to interpret the holy writings, suffocating the freedom of their own thought. Furthermore, they point out, the Church seems far from a consistently good organisation, as many of its members and even priests have been corrupt. Finally, it even seems doubtful to them whether one can speak of a unified Church, when it has national factions, often contradicting one another in various issues.
Bautain is ready to defend the Church. He emphasises the essential freedom of human nature and insists that Christianity does not contradict it. Instead, Bautain states, Christianity is something that is freely chosen by humans, and it is not forced upon them, but at most argued for. He admits that this ideal might not have been always fulfilled, but he thinks this is just indicative of the fact that the heavenly ideal of the Church does not always correspond to the human realisation of this ideal. Thus, Bautain admits, there have been immoral Christians and even priests, and they are to be morally condemned even more forcefully than others, since we should expect more of them. Even so, he thinks, something of that heavenly ideal affects even its worldly image: the core doctrine of Christianity has remained intact through the ages, being ready to be taught to any curious soul.
The Jews become even more perplexed, when they hear what other supposed Christians have to say about their religion: they paint the Old Testament at best as an assortment of legends and metaphors, and they regard Jesus as a philosopher or a magician, but certainly not as a son of God. Bautain notes that all such talk is the fruit of putting reason above faith, although reason is just a capacity for drawing consequences from given principles – but incapable of finding principles for itself. Thus, he insists, while reason can help us in mundane affairs, where it can base its deductions on experience, in questions of supernatural matter, by itself it will just end up with situations like Kantian antinomies, where different opinions seems equally probable and the best is can do is to sceptically believe none of them.
Faith, on the contrary, Bautain explains, is not really a doctrine and nothing to do with truth in the common sense of the word, but an act of becoming connected with the divine – trying to argue about it with the tools of reason is beside the point, and for this reason it is often the less educated who understand the faith better. Then again, he adds, this connection with divine – truth in the higher sense of the word – makes a higher sort of knowledge possible, by giving reason a proper basis in metaphysics.
Bautain begins his introduction to this metaphysics from the question of divinity: is Christian God a unity? At first, Bautain’s answer is affirmative – if asked, a Christian would affirm that God is one and would definitely not place their trust in any other divinity. Yet, from a deeper perspective, the question is not so simple, Bautain suggests. God, he says, is something we simply cannot know at all, thus, we cannot really understand the divine unity. This is, Bautain underlines, true of all things in general, since we, for instance, see the images of physical things, but never really understand their essence or what makes them tick. Humans cannot even know themselves, he insists, as we experience ourselves as in a mirror, through the reflection of a light outside us – no wonder we cannot know the divine light, except throught the revelation of the light itself.
Bautain contrasts the authority of revelation with the supposed faculty of common sense that some of his contemporaries suggested as a criterion of truth. Yet, Bautain notes, common sense is characterised not by being a certain criterion of truth but only by being common to all human beings. What lies behind this common sense, he suggests, is the speech of other human beings, awakening us to our capacity of reason. Yet, he at once adds, the first human being had to be awakened by a speech beyond human being, that is, by the divine word or light.
There are then three forms of light, Bautain suggests: the physical light revealing the natural objects, the rational light of speech revealing the human language and thinking, and the metaphysical light revealing religious truths. Concentrating on this third form, inherent in the teachings of the Christian Church, he insists that this is our only possible guarantee for the existence of God. If we instead try to make rational arguments about the existence of God, Bautain suggests, we essentially swap God with an idol: not with a natural being, like a stone, as in what is commonly understood by idolatry, but with a figment of our imagination, that is, with our personal representation of what it means to be God.
The Jews admit that the divine unity is ineffable, but return to the question they had suggested at the beginning of their correspondence – how can we then say that God is trinity and even make any sense of this statement? Instead of answering, Bautain returns to the theory of threefold light he had just discussed. He connects this discussion to a theory of three faculties of human cognition: imagination, dealing with images of physical objects, understanding, dealing with concepts or notions of relations between images, and intelligence, dealing with ideas of metaphysical prototypes. All these faculties require for their activities – formation of images, distinction of notions and generation of ideas – three conditions: the regard of subject toward its object, object distinct from and still in correspondence with the subject, and the light harmonising the subject and the object.
Now, when using these three faculties, the human mind appears passive, Bautain notes: physical light strikes our eyes and connects us to our external environment, or speech strikes our understanding and intelligence, making us form some concepts. Yet, he at once adds, these are mere materials of our thinking, while thinking still does something to them, combining them into various systems of knowledge. Of course, all these systems depend also on the materials that cannot be created by the mind. Still, Bautain underlines, these materials need not be only those seen by the physical eye, but they can be something seen by the intellectual eye, such as ideas of beauty and goodness.
Where do such pure ideas arise? They are ingrained in our very soul, Bautain suggests, and are just awakened by suitable experiences: for instance, we have an idea of a mathematical point or of a force, principles respectively of geometry and physics, which we then just become conscious of, once certain experiences awaken these ideas. Bautain connects this Platonic idea of ingrained ideas with the Augustinian notion that the ideas are awakened by the divine light of truth. In a rather predictable manner, he then identifies this pure light with the Logos of John’s Gospel, which should have then embodied itself in the body of the human being called Jesus.
Although Bautain’s correspondents are not yet enamoured by the biblical overtones of his theory, they do acknowledge that it is far more convincing than Condillac’s idea of a completely passive human soul that develops thinking through mere sensations. They find even Locke more unconvincing than Bautain, since although this philosopher did admit the power of reflection as another source of knowledge beyond sensation, he did not convincingly explain where such pure ideas like that of being came from.
Bautain’s next line of thought is again Augustinian: all the pure ideas we have exhibit a trinitarian structure, for instance, the geometric idea of a circle has the centre as the origin of the circle (being, in the sense of the kernel from which all the else is derived), the circumference as it form (existence, in the sense of what is derived from being) and the radius as the means for determining the circumference from the centre (life, in the sense of a process mediating between being and existence). Bautain goes through various examples, such as a proposition, where subject is connected to its predicate through copula, but the main point is just to argue that analogically the divinity must also have this same trinitarian nature, where the being of God is connected to the divine existence in its speech or Logos (“I am”) through the living activity of spirit.
Bautain states that the idea of trinity lies behind all true metaphysics. In order to justify this statement, he begins by dividing all objects of science into three groups: eternal and all creating God, created, but free and intelligent humans, and unfree and unintelligent physical world. Humans, Bautain contends, are acquainted with all these three objects: God through the idea of being, themselves through their self-conscience and the physical world through the abstract notion of space.
All three objects, Bautain thinks, are in a sense investigated in the same manner, through a loving embrace of the object by the subject, but through different means: God by admission of divine light or word, ourselves and our moral state through self-consciousness, and physical things through physical light and organic vision. Yet, Bautain insists, all three presuppose the activity inherent in the notion of trinity: physical space is constituted by the movement of a single point in a line, we ourselves are constituted by our soul becoming active intelligences and God is constituted by an eternal movement of the absolute source of being into its appearance as Logos.
Bautain compares this Christian philosophy with other philosophies, finding them all insufficient in comparison. Materialists are quickly dismissed as knowing nothing about the divine light or at least as interested in nothing else, but the animal side of life. Empirical scientists try in vain to find truth in the physical world around us, where it cannot be discovered. Deists do admit that the world around us must be based on a divinity beyond it, but this deistic divinity is a lifeless lawgiver, which cannot explain why the world is what it is and which also cannot base morality on nothing more than formal justice and self-preservation. And while Stoics admit the world to be ruled wisely, they cannot explain why this world appears to be a battlefield between life and death, except by endorsing Manichean dualism.
Moving on to more recent philosophers, Bautain considers Kant to be the epitome of protestant Christianity, attacking all the remnants of scholasticism in philosophy and ending up with speculative atheism that denies all knowledge of the divine. On the side of practical philosophy, according to Bautain, Kant emphasises the imperative of moral conscience as the only basis of human behaviour, but since every individual has their own conscience, the result is Fichtean practical atheism, where humans have absolute freedom to make their decisions by spontaneous choices.
The book begins from a time when the three future converts are still Jewish youth, but already skeptical about their religion, at least in its current state, which they interpret as putting more emphasis on ritualistic traditions than on true moral improvement. They have also been affected by the deistic arguments, but still feel that deism leaves certain of their needs unsatisfied. Furthermore, they are curious about Christianity, but do not understand the reasoning behind some of its mysteries, like the doctrine of the trinitarian nature of God.
Bautain, on his part, commends the three Jews for their spiritual search – indeed, he suggests that this is something brought about by the very hand of God. He at once warns them not to trust deism, because, he thinks, deism misreads God as being a mere force of nature, with no true personality. Indeed, Bautain is certain that Judaism is a much truer belief system than deism, seeing God as a living entity. Bautain is still convinced that Judaism is not the final truth, having been a mere stepping stone toward the true religion or Christianity. Still, it has been a necessary stepping stone, and Christianity without Judaism, he compares, would be like a statue without a pedestal.
What makes Christianity the ultimate truth, Bautain argues, is the simple fact that it is based on divine revelation given to humanity through words of Moses, prophets, Jesus and apostles and retained and fulfilled by the community of the Catholic church: what more justification would it need? Of course, if one sees in the Church nothing more than a human institution, he admits, this justification falls flat. Yet, Bautain is eager to point to moral development of humankind after the founding of the Church as an indirect proof of the truth of Christianity.
Bautain’s correspondents find flaws in this argument. They find it unsettling that they should just believe that the Church knows the right way to interpret the holy writings, suffocating the freedom of their own thought. Furthermore, they point out, the Church seems far from a consistently good organisation, as many of its members and even priests have been corrupt. Finally, it even seems doubtful to them whether one can speak of a unified Church, when it has national factions, often contradicting one another in various issues.
Bautain is ready to defend the Church. He emphasises the essential freedom of human nature and insists that Christianity does not contradict it. Instead, Bautain states, Christianity is something that is freely chosen by humans, and it is not forced upon them, but at most argued for. He admits that this ideal might not have been always fulfilled, but he thinks this is just indicative of the fact that the heavenly ideal of the Church does not always correspond to the human realisation of this ideal. Thus, Bautain admits, there have been immoral Christians and even priests, and they are to be morally condemned even more forcefully than others, since we should expect more of them. Even so, he thinks, something of that heavenly ideal affects even its worldly image: the core doctrine of Christianity has remained intact through the ages, being ready to be taught to any curious soul.
The Jews become even more perplexed, when they hear what other supposed Christians have to say about their religion: they paint the Old Testament at best as an assortment of legends and metaphors, and they regard Jesus as a philosopher or a magician, but certainly not as a son of God. Bautain notes that all such talk is the fruit of putting reason above faith, although reason is just a capacity for drawing consequences from given principles – but incapable of finding principles for itself. Thus, he insists, while reason can help us in mundane affairs, where it can base its deductions on experience, in questions of supernatural matter, by itself it will just end up with situations like Kantian antinomies, where different opinions seems equally probable and the best is can do is to sceptically believe none of them.
Faith, on the contrary, Bautain explains, is not really a doctrine and nothing to do with truth in the common sense of the word, but an act of becoming connected with the divine – trying to argue about it with the tools of reason is beside the point, and for this reason it is often the less educated who understand the faith better. Then again, he adds, this connection with divine – truth in the higher sense of the word – makes a higher sort of knowledge possible, by giving reason a proper basis in metaphysics.
Bautain begins his introduction to this metaphysics from the question of divinity: is Christian God a unity? At first, Bautain’s answer is affirmative – if asked, a Christian would affirm that God is one and would definitely not place their trust in any other divinity. Yet, from a deeper perspective, the question is not so simple, Bautain suggests. God, he says, is something we simply cannot know at all, thus, we cannot really understand the divine unity. This is, Bautain underlines, true of all things in general, since we, for instance, see the images of physical things, but never really understand their essence or what makes them tick. Humans cannot even know themselves, he insists, as we experience ourselves as in a mirror, through the reflection of a light outside us – no wonder we cannot know the divine light, except throught the revelation of the light itself.
Bautain contrasts the authority of revelation with the supposed faculty of common sense that some of his contemporaries suggested as a criterion of truth. Yet, Bautain notes, common sense is characterised not by being a certain criterion of truth but only by being common to all human beings. What lies behind this common sense, he suggests, is the speech of other human beings, awakening us to our capacity of reason. Yet, he at once adds, the first human being had to be awakened by a speech beyond human being, that is, by the divine word or light.
There are then three forms of light, Bautain suggests: the physical light revealing the natural objects, the rational light of speech revealing the human language and thinking, and the metaphysical light revealing religious truths. Concentrating on this third form, inherent in the teachings of the Christian Church, he insists that this is our only possible guarantee for the existence of God. If we instead try to make rational arguments about the existence of God, Bautain suggests, we essentially swap God with an idol: not with a natural being, like a stone, as in what is commonly understood by idolatry, but with a figment of our imagination, that is, with our personal representation of what it means to be God.
The Jews admit that the divine unity is ineffable, but return to the question they had suggested at the beginning of their correspondence – how can we then say that God is trinity and even make any sense of this statement? Instead of answering, Bautain returns to the theory of threefold light he had just discussed. He connects this discussion to a theory of three faculties of human cognition: imagination, dealing with images of physical objects, understanding, dealing with concepts or notions of relations between images, and intelligence, dealing with ideas of metaphysical prototypes. All these faculties require for their activities – formation of images, distinction of notions and generation of ideas – three conditions: the regard of subject toward its object, object distinct from and still in correspondence with the subject, and the light harmonising the subject and the object.
Now, when using these three faculties, the human mind appears passive, Bautain notes: physical light strikes our eyes and connects us to our external environment, or speech strikes our understanding and intelligence, making us form some concepts. Yet, he at once adds, these are mere materials of our thinking, while thinking still does something to them, combining them into various systems of knowledge. Of course, all these systems depend also on the materials that cannot be created by the mind. Still, Bautain underlines, these materials need not be only those seen by the physical eye, but they can be something seen by the intellectual eye, such as ideas of beauty and goodness.
Where do such pure ideas arise? They are ingrained in our very soul, Bautain suggests, and are just awakened by suitable experiences: for instance, we have an idea of a mathematical point or of a force, principles respectively of geometry and physics, which we then just become conscious of, once certain experiences awaken these ideas. Bautain connects this Platonic idea of ingrained ideas with the Augustinian notion that the ideas are awakened by the divine light of truth. In a rather predictable manner, he then identifies this pure light with the Logos of John’s Gospel, which should have then embodied itself in the body of the human being called Jesus.
Although Bautain’s correspondents are not yet enamoured by the biblical overtones of his theory, they do acknowledge that it is far more convincing than Condillac’s idea of a completely passive human soul that develops thinking through mere sensations. They find even Locke more unconvincing than Bautain, since although this philosopher did admit the power of reflection as another source of knowledge beyond sensation, he did not convincingly explain where such pure ideas like that of being came from.
Bautain’s next line of thought is again Augustinian: all the pure ideas we have exhibit a trinitarian structure, for instance, the geometric idea of a circle has the centre as the origin of the circle (being, in the sense of the kernel from which all the else is derived), the circumference as it form (existence, in the sense of what is derived from being) and the radius as the means for determining the circumference from the centre (life, in the sense of a process mediating between being and existence). Bautain goes through various examples, such as a proposition, where subject is connected to its predicate through copula, but the main point is just to argue that analogically the divinity must also have this same trinitarian nature, where the being of God is connected to the divine existence in its speech or Logos (“I am”) through the living activity of spirit.
Bautain states that the idea of trinity lies behind all true metaphysics. In order to justify this statement, he begins by dividing all objects of science into three groups: eternal and all creating God, created, but free and intelligent humans, and unfree and unintelligent physical world. Humans, Bautain contends, are acquainted with all these three objects: God through the idea of being, themselves through their self-conscience and the physical world through the abstract notion of space.
All three objects, Bautain thinks, are in a sense investigated in the same manner, through a loving embrace of the object by the subject, but through different means: God by admission of divine light or word, ourselves and our moral state through self-consciousness, and physical things through physical light and organic vision. Yet, Bautain insists, all three presuppose the activity inherent in the notion of trinity: physical space is constituted by the movement of a single point in a line, we ourselves are constituted by our soul becoming active intelligences and God is constituted by an eternal movement of the absolute source of being into its appearance as Logos.
Bautain compares this Christian philosophy with other philosophies, finding them all insufficient in comparison. Materialists are quickly dismissed as knowing nothing about the divine light or at least as interested in nothing else, but the animal side of life. Empirical scientists try in vain to find truth in the physical world around us, where it cannot be discovered. Deists do admit that the world around us must be based on a divinity beyond it, but this deistic divinity is a lifeless lawgiver, which cannot explain why the world is what it is and which also cannot base morality on nothing more than formal justice and self-preservation. And while Stoics admit the world to be ruled wisely, they cannot explain why this world appears to be a battlefield between life and death, except by endorsing Manichean dualism.
Moving on to more recent philosophers, Bautain considers Kant to be the epitome of protestant Christianity, attacking all the remnants of scholasticism in philosophy and ending up with speculative atheism that denies all knowledge of the divine. On the side of practical philosophy, according to Bautain, Kant emphasises the imperative of moral conscience as the only basis of human behaviour, but since every individual has their own conscience, the result is Fichtean practical atheism, where humans have absolute freedom to make their decisions by spontaneous choices.
To account for the existence of the world around them, Bautain thinks, the idealistic philosophy of nature turns on to internal vision (he does not mention any particular figure, but there are definite Schellingian vibes here). This vision suggests that everything is based on an absolute unity that as living source opens up to itself as an object or as a dualistic existence or universe that tries to return to the original unity: this is essentially pantheism, because all the universe is seen as a mere development of God. What is missing even from this latest philosophical invention, Bautain suggests, is the trinitarian mystery of divine being generating Logos that creates everything else and divine life flowing from both of them as a light revealing everything to humans.
At this point, the Jews feel that they are sufficiently convinced of the truth of the trinity. Yet, they feel that their conviction is still just philosophical and not the faith that a true Christian would have. Bautain assures them that they already have Catholic faith, but they have just been confused by their philosophical learning. To make the matter clearer, Bautain suggests investigating what it means to believe or have faith in something. Belief in the most general sense, he says, is just adhering to a truth, and in order to be able to believe in the existence of something real, this real thing must have acted upon us in some manner and we must have observed this action in some manner. This action could have been by natural things, leading to natural belief, by human speech, leading to moral belief, or by divine intervention, leading to supernatural faith.
In each of the three cases, Bautain thinks, the belief or faith is generated through three steps: firstly, we feel the action of the object on us, secondly, we attend to and reflect on this experience, and finally, we have reflected consciousness of the effect of the object on us. Taking the belief or faith as this whole process, he argues, we see that knowledge arises from belief or faith, not the other way around. Indeed, Bautain insists, the certainty of all our knowledge can ultimately be based only on belief and faith, which is based on the innermost interaction with the object of belief of faith. Of course, he admits, we often feel hesitant about the things we have beliefs of or faith in, but this is just due to our reason hesitating, because we have wandered away from the light that originally generated the belief or faith in us.
Just like there are three kinds of belief, Bautain argues, there are three kinds of certainty. Physical certainty, he begins, is based on sensation, through which we are convinced that fire burns etc., but it tells at most what things are for us, not what they are in themselves. Moral certainty, Bautain continues, is based on reason, acquired through interaction with other people, but it is far from infallible, because of the possibility of human error. This leaves as the profoundest kind the metaphysical certainty, Bautain says, based on the most intimate interaction with the divine.
The converts-to-become are also perplexed how people who have not even heard the biblical tales would be able to become part of this faith. Bautain suggests that God has still inscribed some essential truths, like moral law, to the minds of all human beings. Thus, he insists, all human beings have the possibility of feeling the connection to the divine through their own conscience. This means, firstly, that all humans know in their innermost self what is the right way to act and they need just to be reminded about it by external instruction about the moral law. Similarly, Bautain suggests, the metaphysical truths about the nature of the divine have already been inscribed in our mind and the revelation merely awakens us to recognise them, if we are just ready to hear what it has to say.
The three youth raise another question: if all the examples of philosophy presented thus far have veered off from the Catholic doctrine, are philosophy and religion, and especially theology, necessarily in contradiction with one another? Bautain denies this and insists that philosophy or science in general need not be antagonistic toward Christianity, and although they often seem endeavours fairly independent of one another, science can be used to confirm religion. True philosophy, he says, should not be just a description of natural phenomena, but a science of human condition and its relation to the divine, thus, it already presupposes faith in the existence of God, just like true theology should not ignore nature and humanity.
Science in general, Bautain explains, especially in its most exact form in mathematics, is based, firstly, on the analytically precise use of language, and secondly, on the necessity of the laws governing its objects: a line must have a beginning and an end, a figure must be enclosed by angles, number presupposes a unit etc. If the same exactness should be extended to philosophy as the study of human beings, he continues, we should remember that humans are not just physical, but also moral creatures. Thus, Bautain concludes, philosophy cannot be as precise as mathematics, if it has not revealed, in addition to Kantian forms of space and time, also an architectonic of its own spiritual nature. This means, firstly, knowing the genetic development of the various faculties of the human mind – how is e.g. memory related to imagination – but also knowing the source of the whole human mind or God.
Bautain notes that while a true philosopher or lover of wisdom is inevitably led to search for this wisdom beyond human beings, in the divine, a sophist instead searches for the wisdom within humanity, confusing it with mere universal reason. Thus, he suggests, sophists are lured by rationalistic pantheism, which is nothing but an aggrandised form of human self-love.
Bautain proceeds to recount the phases of true philosophy and sophism – an account which is from the perspective of current times sorely lacking in historical accuracy, especially when it comes the early eras of humankind, since at Bautain's time historical research hadn’t yet developed much further beyond using Bible as a source for everything. Thus, Bautain begins from Adam and his third son Seth, Noah and his first son Sem, Abraham and especially Moses as the founders of the true philosophy, inscribed in the Pentateuch and the other books of the Old Testament. The more mundane part of philosophy, he continues, began with the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham, that is, the Egyptians, who also retained some knowledge of the more divine affairs.
The Egyptian tradition of philosophy, Bautain believes, was brought to Greece by Pythagoras, who was still also a religious figure, teaching rituals in addition to the more speculative philosophy. The work of Pythagoras was continued by Socrates, Bautain states, but on a more superficial level, since Socrates was not interested in the ritualistic side of Pythagoreanism, and indeed, was more of a destroyer of beliefs than an upholder of positive doctrines, questioning youth and encouraging them to speak their opinions, when Pythagoras had commanded them just to listen silently what was taught to them. Still, Bautain concedes, Socrates was ultimately aiming to make divine truths accessible to humankind, and this trend continued with Plato, who was enamoured by the spiritual teachings of Pythagoras, but unfortunately lacked the necessary practical component and succumbed eventually to pantheism. On the other hand, Bautain contrasts, Aristotle upheld the more rationalistic side of Socrates, taking Platonic ideas as mere abstractions of thought and reducing philosophy into a lifeless system of axioms and syllogisms, the content of which amounted to nothing but pantheism, with universal reason replacing the part of true divinity.
The discussion of the history of philosophy is stopped for now, with the first volume of Bautain’s work ending. We shall see where the second volume will take us in the next post.
At this point, the Jews feel that they are sufficiently convinced of the truth of the trinity. Yet, they feel that their conviction is still just philosophical and not the faith that a true Christian would have. Bautain assures them that they already have Catholic faith, but they have just been confused by their philosophical learning. To make the matter clearer, Bautain suggests investigating what it means to believe or have faith in something. Belief in the most general sense, he says, is just adhering to a truth, and in order to be able to believe in the existence of something real, this real thing must have acted upon us in some manner and we must have observed this action in some manner. This action could have been by natural things, leading to natural belief, by human speech, leading to moral belief, or by divine intervention, leading to supernatural faith.
In each of the three cases, Bautain thinks, the belief or faith is generated through three steps: firstly, we feel the action of the object on us, secondly, we attend to and reflect on this experience, and finally, we have reflected consciousness of the effect of the object on us. Taking the belief or faith as this whole process, he argues, we see that knowledge arises from belief or faith, not the other way around. Indeed, Bautain insists, the certainty of all our knowledge can ultimately be based only on belief and faith, which is based on the innermost interaction with the object of belief of faith. Of course, he admits, we often feel hesitant about the things we have beliefs of or faith in, but this is just due to our reason hesitating, because we have wandered away from the light that originally generated the belief or faith in us.
Just like there are three kinds of belief, Bautain argues, there are three kinds of certainty. Physical certainty, he begins, is based on sensation, through which we are convinced that fire burns etc., but it tells at most what things are for us, not what they are in themselves. Moral certainty, Bautain continues, is based on reason, acquired through interaction with other people, but it is far from infallible, because of the possibility of human error. This leaves as the profoundest kind the metaphysical certainty, Bautain says, based on the most intimate interaction with the divine.
The converts-to-become are also perplexed how people who have not even heard the biblical tales would be able to become part of this faith. Bautain suggests that God has still inscribed some essential truths, like moral law, to the minds of all human beings. Thus, he insists, all human beings have the possibility of feeling the connection to the divine through their own conscience. This means, firstly, that all humans know in their innermost self what is the right way to act and they need just to be reminded about it by external instruction about the moral law. Similarly, Bautain suggests, the metaphysical truths about the nature of the divine have already been inscribed in our mind and the revelation merely awakens us to recognise them, if we are just ready to hear what it has to say.
The three youth raise another question: if all the examples of philosophy presented thus far have veered off from the Catholic doctrine, are philosophy and religion, and especially theology, necessarily in contradiction with one another? Bautain denies this and insists that philosophy or science in general need not be antagonistic toward Christianity, and although they often seem endeavours fairly independent of one another, science can be used to confirm religion. True philosophy, he says, should not be just a description of natural phenomena, but a science of human condition and its relation to the divine, thus, it already presupposes faith in the existence of God, just like true theology should not ignore nature and humanity.
Science in general, Bautain explains, especially in its most exact form in mathematics, is based, firstly, on the analytically precise use of language, and secondly, on the necessity of the laws governing its objects: a line must have a beginning and an end, a figure must be enclosed by angles, number presupposes a unit etc. If the same exactness should be extended to philosophy as the study of human beings, he continues, we should remember that humans are not just physical, but also moral creatures. Thus, Bautain concludes, philosophy cannot be as precise as mathematics, if it has not revealed, in addition to Kantian forms of space and time, also an architectonic of its own spiritual nature. This means, firstly, knowing the genetic development of the various faculties of the human mind – how is e.g. memory related to imagination – but also knowing the source of the whole human mind or God.
Bautain notes that while a true philosopher or lover of wisdom is inevitably led to search for this wisdom beyond human beings, in the divine, a sophist instead searches for the wisdom within humanity, confusing it with mere universal reason. Thus, he suggests, sophists are lured by rationalistic pantheism, which is nothing but an aggrandised form of human self-love.
Bautain proceeds to recount the phases of true philosophy and sophism – an account which is from the perspective of current times sorely lacking in historical accuracy, especially when it comes the early eras of humankind, since at Bautain's time historical research hadn’t yet developed much further beyond using Bible as a source for everything. Thus, Bautain begins from Adam and his third son Seth, Noah and his first son Sem, Abraham and especially Moses as the founders of the true philosophy, inscribed in the Pentateuch and the other books of the Old Testament. The more mundane part of philosophy, he continues, began with the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham, that is, the Egyptians, who also retained some knowledge of the more divine affairs.
The Egyptian tradition of philosophy, Bautain believes, was brought to Greece by Pythagoras, who was still also a religious figure, teaching rituals in addition to the more speculative philosophy. The work of Pythagoras was continued by Socrates, Bautain states, but on a more superficial level, since Socrates was not interested in the ritualistic side of Pythagoreanism, and indeed, was more of a destroyer of beliefs than an upholder of positive doctrines, questioning youth and encouraging them to speak their opinions, when Pythagoras had commanded them just to listen silently what was taught to them. Still, Bautain concedes, Socrates was ultimately aiming to make divine truths accessible to humankind, and this trend continued with Plato, who was enamoured by the spiritual teachings of Pythagoras, but unfortunately lacked the necessary practical component and succumbed eventually to pantheism. On the other hand, Bautain contrasts, Aristotle upheld the more rationalistic side of Socrates, taking Platonic ideas as mere abstractions of thought and reducing philosophy into a lifeless system of axioms and syllogisms, the content of which amounted to nothing but pantheism, with universal reason replacing the part of true divinity.
The discussion of the history of philosophy is stopped for now, with the first volume of Bautain’s work ending. We shall see where the second volume will take us in the next post.
