Louis Eugène Marie Bautain: Philosophy of Christianity – Second volume

Bautain begins the second volume of his book by continuing with his account of the history of philosophy. He had ended the first volume with the mention of Aristotle, and next he jumps over most of the Hellenistic period to Neoplatonism, which he takes to be nothing but an eclectic conglomeration of Jewish traditions, Greek philosophical doctrines and oriental superstitions and suggests it to be a providential example of what errors human reason is capable by itself. Bautain contrasts Neoplatonism with New Testament and the Church Fathers, who, he claims, founded the true science by investigating especially the trinitarian nature of the divinity.

Bautain’s view of medieval philosophy is highly critical. He understands the aim of the scholastics, who were keen to defend philosophy against heresies invented by human reason. Yet, Bautain thinks that the weapons they used, that is, the syllogistic and the whole Aristotelian philosophy, were incompatible with the living nature of Christian faith. He does admit that philosophers like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas found great truths by their faith, but regrets that they had to mutilate their ideas by presenting these in the rigid scholastic form.

The most regrettable result of scholastic philosophy, according to Bautain, was that human reason once again thought itself capable of knowing the truth by itself, without the help of faith. This led, Bautain thinks, straight to the idea of Cartesian doubt, which ultimately remained vague in its very principles, since it never could explain what even this thinking thing was in its nature. A similar cry for beginning from tabula rasa regarding the external nature, Bautain suggests, was heralded by the Baconian philosophy, which, in addition to Cartesianism, Bautain sees as a principle of all modern philosophy. The effect of Descartes and Bacon, Bautain insists, was making philosophy again a pagan affair, which he considers to be especially embodied in the contemporary German philosophy or Schellingian pantheism, which he sees as a resurrection of Neoplatonism.

Bautain moves to consider specifically the current French schools of philosophy. He starts with the Enlightenment philosophers, all of whom he deems as mere materialists and as responsible for the anarchy of the French revolution. Bautain especially emphasises the role of Condillac as the instigator of the later ideological school of Destutt de Tracy, which in Bautain’s eyes made humans into mere thinking machines and especially led to a complete indifference to religion.

After the restoration of French monarchy, Bautain continues, the ideological school was replaced by the followers of the Scottish common sense school. He finds the whole premise of this school suspect, since it tries to determine the nature of human mind through self-consciousness, although even Kant had shown this to be a flawed attempt. Furthermore, Bautain continues, the common sense school is interested merely in the worldly side of human experience, ignoring the question of his future fate. Thus, he concludes, common sense philosophers are at best just deists, who do not know the living God.

The final contemporary French school Bautain mentions is that of eclecticism, founded by Victor Cousin. Bautain is reluctant to criticise Cousin, having been his student and still considering him a friend. Still, Bautain cannot really endorse Cousin’s eclecticism. Much of it, he says, is essentially just a repetition of the common sense philosophy, with all the same faults, and what Cousin adds to it is just a view that all historical schools of thought have had some grain of truth in them, which Bautain finds repugnant, as it lowers Christianity on the same level as all the non-Christian philosophies. Bautain is especially distrustful of Cousin’s affinity with the contemporary German philosophy, which pantheistically reduces spirit and matter, God and human, and indeed everything into a featureless absolute.

Bautain turns his critical eye next to contemporary theologians. Apparently his views had aroused some controversy, since he attaches to the letters published in the book an explanation that when criticising scholasticism, he does not criticise Catholicism. In fact, he says, scholasticism is just a method, that is, application of Aristotelian logic and philosophy to Christianity. There’s nothing particularly Christian in Aristotle, Bautain argues, and indeed, his logic is good mostly for disputation. In fact, he emphasises, Church Fathers did not use Aristotle in their works, but tried to positively make sense of the things they had faith in. Bautain admits also that the scholastic method still has its uses, for instance, in making our reason more precise, but the point is that reason by itself cannot reach the essential truths.

In the original correspondence, Bautain does not even pay this lip service to scholasticism, but begins an all out attack against the contemporary scholastics, who tried to base things of faith on reason. Theology, he insists, hasn’t really progressed in the last few centuries, and theologians seem completely unaware of the developments in other sciences. Although Bautain speaks of scholasticism, the theology he investigates is actually based on Cartesianism, even if the methods used are otherwise Aristotelian. 

The current theologians, Bautain starts, begin with a Cartesian doubt, imagining that reason could set up metaphysics without any recourse to faith. Indeed, he adds, they restrict the whole nature of human soul to this one faculty of reason or thinking, ignoring the wealth of richness hidden within the human mind. No wonder they then proceed directly to logic, by which they understand mere study of reasoning and especially syllogisms, without any comprehension of the limits of reasoning shown by Kant, Bautain underlines and emphasises that syllogisms by themselves can merely show that some statements are consistent with one another, but cannot provide their own premisses.

Armed with the methods of logic, Bautain states, the modern theologians continue to apply them to abstract ontological notions like being as such that don’t have any proper content in themselves: we do not feel what this being is like, unlike when the very source of being or God touches us. When they then divide being into material and spiritual beings, he insists, they seem to imply that the two share the same nature, forming one monistic whole with two poles, and when they then further divide the spiritual being into finite and infinite spiritual beings, they seem to add that this whole is even pantheistic, whole of existence forming a mere gradual continuum from matter to God.

Theologians try to prove, in a manner reminiscent of Descartes, the existence of God from their notion of being, but relying on both Kant and Paul, Bautain thinks their attempt is doomed to fail. All demonstrations happen through equation, deduction or induction, he suggests, but none of these work with the topic of God: equation is ruled out, because there is nothing equal to God, if one tried to deduce the existence of God from the existence of being in general, this would essentially make God pantheistically into a mere aspect of the whole existence, and induction fails, because we cannot understand infinity from our merely finite experiences. In fact, Bautain insists, the only way to reach a true faith in God is to accept the divine Logos speaking to our very minds, and if someone refuses to do that, no manner of argument can really persuade them.

Equally fruitless in Bautain’s eyes are the rest of the branches of modern scholasticism. He especially focuses on the study of human nature, which he deems equally entangled with dead abstractions and ignoring the true living unity of individual humans. Thus, Bautain reproaches, these neo-scholastics do not consider such important questions as what the future fate of humanity is like, being satisfied with such dry notions as the simplicity of spiritual substance. This dryness is especially felt, he thinks, in morality, which instead of concrete situations requiring moral consideration investigate mere abstract notions pertaining to morality.

Bautain does not suggest a complete abandonment of a philosophical study of Christianity, but more its reworking: less listing of historical heresies and their refutations, more edification of heart. Instead of ontology of being in general, he suggests founding theology on faith in the divine trinity. This should be supplemented, Bautain continues, with analytical psychology, investigating the facts of consciousness and their genesis in the history of an individual and the whole human species. Only after these fundamental disciplines should follow logic, the main task of which would be to determine the limits of the use of reason, on the basis of its place among all faculties, and to recognise, not truth as such, but only truth in certain contexts and especially faults in reasoning. The final apex of this study would be morality, based on the dual nature of humanity and its relation to the divine.

Bautain introduced a further supplement to the correspondence, concerning what he considers an increasing threat of pantheism, inspired by the German idealism of Fichte, Schelling and now also Hegel. Bautain considers it especially dangerous that French Catholic priests do not have the means to deal with this new enemy, since they are still engaged in age-old heresies not relevant in the current situation. Pantheism in itself, he suggests, is a perennial enemy of Christianity, and indeed, all other philosophies eventually become just pantheism, whether we are dealing with Gnosticism, Platonism or Cartesianism. The current pantheism, Bautain suggests, is a reaction to sensualist philosophy, reverting from the everyday common sense to vaguely idealistic speculations.

The main thrust of this new form of pantheism, Bautain suggests, is to again synthesise all the developments of science into a unity incorporating God as well as nature and humans. All its proponents, he continues, divide it into two parts, first of which provides an insight into this unity in its purity, independently of all appearances, while the second part applies the first into the realms of nature and humanity. Thus, Bautain concludes, the new pantheists see individual disciplines as mere reflections of the whole of science, describing the unity incorporating everything.

What makes this form of pantheism especially dangerous, Bautain thinks, is that for the first time it is a pantheistic doctrine that has found footstep in the society at large. It sees all religions as mere development of our understanding of the all-encompassing unity, he explains, hence degrading the status of Christianity to a mere temporary quirk that will be replaced by a more refined religion. Because of its popularity, this attempted replacement has its effects in the practical affairs, Bautain argues and suggests that young people are already dismissing the notion of Christian charity and speaking instead of philanthropy and harmony, which still are too sterile concepts to actually incite anyone to action. He sees the effects of pantheism also in sciences, where the place of the analysis has been taken by an almost poetic urge to synthesise, and in arts, the task of which is not anymore to imitate the beauty of nature, but to manifest the divine unity in complete independence of anything outside art.

In the realm of politics, Bautain states, principles like justice have been replaced by a fatalistic following of the supposed necessity of events, crushing individual happiness under the banner of common good. Then again, he adds, a pantheistic individual has no reason to consider the good of others, since anything they do will always be a manifestation of the divine, no matter how immoral it may seem.

Bautain returns from this detour back to the original series of letters, where the three converts have a new worry. They wonder about the doctrine of the original sin, which appears to contradict the evident glory of humanity that holds the veritable crown among all the creatures of Earth and has a capacity for infinite perfectibility: how could all this be reconciled with the supposed depravity of human nature? And supposing this depravity of original sin is true, how can it have affected the whole humanity, when it is essentially the fault of one human being?

Bautain insists that despite all their marvelous achievements, humans still are in a state of deprivation: just look at the fact that none of those achievements appears to satisfy us, but we always yearn for more. Furthermore, when we speak of the glory of humans, we refer to humans at the height of their development, but forget that their first state is one of weakness, where the power of reason is still dormant. And when a child grows, they do not automatically become purely good and virtuous, but more of a melange of brightest generosity and deepest egoism. A human is an animal with mere animal desires, one might say as an excuse, but why are they then given a reason that is not satisfied with its animal condition?

For Bautain, God's condemnation of the original sin is just a proof of divine justice. God has set up a law, Bautain explains, in order to make humans happy and thus wants them to follow it, but if they don't, God must act as a judge. How come then has the original sin transferred from one person to the rest of humanity? Bautain suggests that the first sinner being the progenitor of all human race has causally affected the whole humanity, which forms a genetic unity due to its common ancestors.

The Jews admit all that Bautain has taught them, but raise another problem: where has all the evil, such as sin and death, come from? Is it ascribable to God, as Paul seems to imply, when he says that everything is from, by and in God? Does this mean that evil is eternal and what this implies for the accountability of humans? What is the law that humans are supposed to follow and how come the first human could have known it, when even philosophers don't agree on this matter?

Bautain's answer begins with another warning against pantheism: although it may sound so, Paul's statement does not equate everything with God. Instead, Bautain explains, what Paul meant was that all that is, in a primary sense of the word, comes from God. This still leaves the possibility of something not deriving from God, namely, evil, as long as it is not being in the proper sense of the word.

God did not necessarily develop or emanate into the world, Bautain underlines, but freely created it, that is, willed into existence, what they had thought in their wisdom (from God), through their Logos or Word (by God), in an act incomprehensible to mere humans. What God created, he continues, was two substances – heaven and earth – or spiritual and corporeal nature, both sustained by divine life (in God), without which both would return to non-existence. With this life, on the other hand, both are immortal, Bautain assures us, so that not just our soul, but also our body can live forever. In summary, the world in its possibility depends on divine wisdom, but in its reality on divine will.

The world created by God, Bautain insists, cannot be nothing but good. Where do evil, sin and death then come? In an Augustinian manner, Bautain suggests they are mere negations: evil is just the lack of good in our actions or an abuse of our freedom, sin is the effect of this evil, as a breaking of law, and death is just the necessary consequence of sin as a removal of life. This explanation does not fully satisfy his correspondents, who ask Bautain how come even the possibility of choosing wrongly exists, before the appearance of sin, and indeed, what this mysterious freedom or liberty actually is: it is supposed to be the highest glory of human beings, yet, it enables their lowest deprivation. Furthermore, they add, couldn’t God wisely have foreseen that humans will abuse their freedom and why were humans created so weak as to err?

Bautain reaffirms that evil is nothing in itself and especially not derived from God, but a consequence of a free choice by an intelligent creature. This possibility of free choice, he continues, is something inherent in all creatures, even if they are merely physical, since they can react spontaneously and in an individual manner to their environment. With moral creatures or humans, Bautain suggests, this freedom occurs as a possibility to live either a mere natural or a spiritual life, in answer to speech awakening us to this possibility. Finally, he concludes, with metaphysical creatures or pure intelligences, freedom means capacity to receive or refuse divine light.

Whatever the form of freedom in creatures, Bautain analyses, it presupposes objective life giving an impulse to the free subject, capacity of the subject to receive and retain life, and the capacity to react positively or negatively to life. This is completely different from divine freedom, he explains, since God has life in themselves, while the freedom of other beings is spontaneous only on the condition of reacting to something else: creation merely sets out this capacity to react, which then must still be activated by the vivifying power of things around us. In the case of humans, Bautain states, this vivifying power comes from both the physical things sustaining our bodies and the speech sustaining our spirits.

Due to their dependence, Bautain insists, human beings should turn themselves toward the source of their life, in other words, God. Indeed, he underlines, this harmony of the divine and human or love toward God is the very law that humans should follow – you are dependent on the life given by God, thus, you should acknowledge it. Breaking this law, Bautain explains, means simply that the human being pretends to be autonomous and independent of God, breaking the connection to that very source, without which they cannot even exist.

The three Jews are still perplexed, why God provided humans even with the possibility of turning away from God, since this seems a peculiarly cruel trick. Bautain assures them that the only motive God does anything is love, because as completely free God is in need of nothing. The temptation for humans to do evil must then originate from somewhere else, namely, Bautain states, in purely metaphysical, non-corporeal entities (biblical angles), vivified directly by the divine idea and with the capacity to decide their very mode of existence by choice: this differs, he explains, from humans, who are determined by their belonging to their common genus, linked together by their line of ancestry.

All creatures, Bautain affirms, exist indefinitely after their creation, because they are sustained by the unending divine love, and this is true also of angels. Now, he continues, the first act of angels is to instinctively and spontaneously react to the vivifying power of God: they feel the action of life, they are conscious of this feeling and freely act on the basis of this consciousness. Their action may be one of accepting this divine gift, but it can also be the opposite one of rejection. Why would an angel do that? Bautain’s explanation is its very power: an angel feeling itself self-sufficient might well choose to let go of the divine life. While the choice of self-abnegation and surrender to the divine life would make an angel bright and good, he continues, the opposite act would not destroy it – the divine love still sustains its existence that much – but would make it a creature of shadow and chaos, aiming to lure all the other creatures to the same condition of disharmony.

What comes from God, Bautain summarises, are the power of free choice of all creatures and the occasion to use it for harmony with the source of all life, but God does not determine, in which way the creatures will act: that would mean that the choice would not be free. The egoistic choice of the fallen angels, Bautain concludes, is therefore not the responsibility of God, because God has not wanted this choice, but merely out of pure love gave them the opportunity to forge the fate they wanted. God has known the possibility of a bad choice, Bautain admits, but insists that as pure goodness they could not have known in advance that the choice would be bad. God would immediately take the fallen angels back to the harmonious state, if they so wanted, Bautain underlines, but after their first choice, they continue making the same bad choice again and again.

Bautain attaches to this metaphysical tale a familiar sort of reading of the first few chapters of Genesis. After creating the spiritual and the physical world, he begins, God created humankind as mediating the two realms, with supernatural spirits incorporated in terrestrial bodies and thus different from purely spiritual angels. Because of their semi-terrestrial nature, humans were not directly connected to the divine, Bautain explains, but could only hear the divine speech or Logos and believe this to be divine. In addition, he points out, humans were connected to the physical world that threatened to lure them away from the link to the divine. The fallen angels, Bautain notes, encouraged the humans to succumb to this temptation.

Due to the unity of humankind, this original sin of the first human beings, Bautain insists, became a disposition for personal sin in each individual human being. The sin, he explains, consists of a contradiction of two elements: objective will of God manifested to a creature and subjective will of this creature to act against the first. The contradiction, Bautain adds, is proportional to the intelligence of the creature, so that the sin of an angel is greater than the sin of a human being. Still, he states, the result of both of them is the same, namely, the disruption of the rapport between God and the creature, when the creatures turn themselves away from the divine. Yet, Bautain notes, the consequences of the result still differ: the angel has turned away from God with all their will, because of the simplicity of their nature, while for the human being as a combination of animal and spiritual substances, this turning means a disruption of the hierarchy of the two substances, the body being not anymore in full control of the soul.

The human soul is still immortal, Bautain notes, but it is deprived of its full satisfaction, available only from interaction with the divine, and thus feels an ever rekindling desire that gnaws its mind. The soul is also free and susceptible to the power of God, if it just heard the divine speech, but due to the break, it hears only the whispers of the fallen angels and becomes more and more ruled by the animal nature of the body. Finally, Bautain concludes, without properly controlling the body, the soul experiences the natural transformation of this body as its destruction or death.

Couldn’t God just restore the lost connection to humans and other fallen creatures? Yes, Bautain admits, but adds at once that this would go against respecting their liberty: if people want to stay away from the divine, God does not force themselves on them. Humans by themselves do not even recognise that they have distanced themselves from God through their sin, thus, Bautain argues, they must at first have to be told by their conscience that they are living in a sinful state. This consciousness of sin is not enough for restituting the lost harmony, he continues, but a punishment is required to balance the scales of justice. The problem is, Bautain explains, that no human is anymore innocent, so that the only possible solution has been the Christian one: sacrificing an incarnation of the very speech of God.

Why did God wait for so long before committing this salvational act? Because it was necessary to let humans themselves develop into a state where they freely desired redemption, Bautain explains: the evil of the fall had to be diminished to a degree where it was again possible for the souls of humans to search for God and for the bodies become pure enough to serve as a vessel for the divine.

Returning again to his account of the history of philosophy, Bautain states that from the very beginning, humans have had two foundational ideas on which to base knowledge: that of God and that of themselves in their separation from the divine. These ideas and the consequent true monotheism, Bautain adds, were retained in their pure form by the Jews, while with the rest of the world, monotheism degraded into pantheism, and even more, into animalistic polytheism. It is only at the point when the contradiction between the two was grown into its highest prominence, Bautain concludes, that the time for the liberator or redeemer had come.

This liberator, Bautain underlines again, had to be a real human being and not a mere fictional symbol, like Homeric heroes. Furthermore, he adds, he was not just a wise person, like Confucius, Zarathustra or Socrates, but a divine person. Bautain admits that he cannot really explain how the two sides of the saviour are connected, but then again, he retorts, we cannot even explain how natural generation of humans and animals happens and we are not rejecting their actuality. Besides, he notes, humans are similarly a synthesis of two different kinds of substances, which is something equally incomprehensible to us, although we can say that the divine life has something to do with this union, and just like by the word “I” we refer both to our body and to our spirit, so should the liberator act in some ways as human and in other ways as God.

Bautain advertises the Catholic Church as the place where the work of the redeemer continues: the redeemer has established a change in the spiritual nature of human beings, but this change must be affected through sensuous means or sacraments, such as the devouring of the body of redeemer taking the form of bread. This does not mean, he explains, that all the members of the Church or even all its priests are holy, because the affairs of the world might still tempt them. Still, Bautain assures the three friends, as members of the Church and as its priests, they do complete their task of transmitting the redemption to future generations. Thus, Bautain concludes his correspondence by asking the three friends to leave the ways of the world and set their faith in the Church – not just as members in name only, but as true, believing Christians.

Théodore Simon Jouffroy: Systems of necessity, mysticism and pantheism

Jouffroy has indicated that there are three philosophical stances that contradict natural right as he envisions it: firstly, denying the possibility of obligations for reasons independent of moral phenomena, secondly, denying the existence of obligations, because no such things can be found within moral phenomena, and thirdly, accepting the existence of obligations, but misunderstanding their nature. Starting with the first stance, Jouffroy finds four types of philosophical systems exemplifying it: systems of necessity, mysticism, pantheism and skepticism. I shall look in this post three of them and leave skepticism for the next post.

Joyffroy means by a system of necessity any philosophy that explicitly denies the existence of human freedom: if humans aren’t free, they cannot have any obligations. He does not attempt to give a full listing of all philosophical systems of this kind, but only mentions four prominent examples. First of these examples is Hobbesian philosophy, where the true notion of liberty is replaced, Jouffroy thinks, with a fictitious definition of liberty as the power of doing what we will. He dismisses this idea quickly, noting that this definition could make all unrestrained beings free – even rivers and wind – and that true liberty lies in our capacity to make spontaneous resolutions.

Jouffroy is equally quick with his second example or the Humean philosophy. Jouffroy reads Hume as insisting on the illusory nature of causality and thus indirectly also denying human freedom, which hinges on the possibility of humans being causes. Jouffroy’s short answer to Hume is that we do have a notion of cause and that we even can apply it in experience, because we feel ourselves as the cause of our actions.

Jouffroy takes more seriously the third example of such philosophical systems, which says that human volition is constrained by motives, so that the strongest motive inevitably determines human will. He quickly mentions Thomas Reid’s objection that there might be motiveless actions, but is not very convinced about it. Instead, Jouffroy concentrates his critique on the point that motives do not seem like constraints: even if I have a good motive for not throwing myself out of the window, I still could do it. He is especially doubtful about the notion of the strongest motive. Jouffroy reminds the reader about the three kinds of things motivating our actions – passions, motives arising from self-interest and obligations. He suggests that while we can compare the strength of two motives of the same type, we cannot quantitatively compare e.g. the strength of passions and obligations.

Jouffroy brings forward two arguments for the idea of motives determining the will. First, he notes that we often try to guess what a person will do, when we know their motives. Jouffroy admits this, but adds that such predictions are never meant to be fully certain. Secondly, he points out that we often do speak of governing human beings, as if they were just mechanical things. Jouffroy’s answer is that this a case of an analogy and that rewards and punishments used for governing people can at most influence, but never determine their behaviour.

The final example of a system of necessity Jouffroy gives is the idea of divine foreknowledge: because God knows what will happen, for instance, what we will do tomorrow, we cannot really do anything freely. Jouffroy admits that he would be more willing to reject the notion of divine foreknowledge, since the idea of free will seems more certain. Yet, he is doubtful whether the two ideas really contradict one another. Jouffroy emphasises that we should not judge divine foreknowledge by human standards and suggests that it is more like us observing past events: we know what a person has done yesterday and still what they did was freely chosen by them.

Jouffroy moves from the systems of necessity to mysticism. He describes it as an answer to the correct observations that we humans cannot achieve our absolute end in this life and that we can achieve even imperfect good only through great efforts. Mysticism explains these facts, Jouffroy notes, by introducing a Manichean figure of evil, who has ruined the current world, or by interpreting our current life as a punishment for earlier sins (he even thinks that the Christian story of fall merges these two idea by combining the notion of devil with the notion of original sin). The conclusion mysticism draws from the lousy state of the human condition is that there is no reason for us to do anything at all, except wait for a better world.

Jouffroy describes in more detail the consequences of mysticism. Mystics often distance themselves from the world that constantly nullifies all human efforts. Furthermore, he adds, they also abhor the human body, because it makes the human being suspect to the influence of the material world. Mystics also avoid all physical actions with a meaningful goal, Jouffroy notes, although they sometimes do something futile, in order to show how all actions are in vain. In addition, they avoid all human connections, preferring solitude over the affairs of any community, and even reject all scientific efforts. The only form of action they cannot deny of themselves, Jouffroy states, is the passive contemplation of things. Indeed, they even endorse contemplation as the only possible form of fulfilling human desires, holding ecstatic states in high regard.

The necessary consequence of the mystical idea that all actions are futile, Jouffroy thinks, is that there are no moral differences between any of them. A clear result of this stance is the denial of obligations, since no action is inherently better than any other. Jouffroy notes that some mystical schools have thus decided to just engage with mere pleasure seeking, since it is inherently no better than asceticism.

Jouffroy’s argument against mysticism is that the desire to instantly jump to the absolute end of human beings is a childish desire. Indeed, he insists, if we would be instantly happy, when we are born, we would be mere things and not moral persons, with notions of merit and demerit. Thus, Jouffroy concludes, the imperfection of our current world must be explained by a need for a moral proving ground, where we can grow to become good people.

Moving on to pantheism, Jouffroy begins by studying Spinoza’s philosophy, because Joyffroy thinks Spinoza to have been the most consistent pantheist in the history of philosophy. Still, despite this consistency, Jouffroy notes in Spinoza a fundamental contradiction: Spinoza states that human souls follow the laws of necessity and are nothing but combinations of ideas, yet, he appears to hold that human souls can freely affect the ideas they consist of.

Pantheism in general, Jouffroy thinks, leads to a denial of human freedom, because it assumes that only God exists and is free, relegating human beings into mere phenomena that cannot really produce, but only transmit actions. It is thus quite understandable, he says, that pantheism often leads to passivity. Jouffroy tries to explain the lure of pantheism by noting that it is based on the tendency of our reason to regard everything from the standpoint of absolute universality that forgets the existence of individual objects. He suggests as a cure the other method of knowledge, namely, perceptions of real things before us, since they confirm very vividly that there is more to the world than mere abstract universality of being.

Ludwig Feuerbach: Thoughts concerning death and immortality (1830)

(1804 - 1872)

 If at all, Feuerbach is today remembered most often as a mere link from Hegel to Marx. This is at least so far true that the very first published writings of Feuerbach do bear the distinct mark of Hegelianism. Thus, in his dissertation De ratione, una, universali, infinita, Feuerbach contrasts in quite a Hegelian fashion individuality of sense life, where everything is distinct and separate from one another, with the universality of reason and thinking, by which any human being is inherently connected with all the other humans in a mutual act of recognition.

His next major work, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit, continues in the same vein, but connects this distinction especially to the question of personal immortality. Feuerbach considers this question rather modern: ancient Greeks and Romans believed only in current life, lived in and for a community, while mediaevals merely hoped for immortality in some distant future, where everyone would be resurrected and good deeds rewarded and evil punished. It is only the protestantism and the rationalist philosophy, he insists, that suggested an individual subject to be of such importance that it deserved immortality in itself.

Yet, Feuerbach leaps to a conclusion, such an emphasis on individuals has made us forget that there is something much more important and perfect than mere individual life. This more perfect or infinite Feuerbach now calls God or spirit (again, in quite a Hegelian fashion). Just like reason in Feuerbach’s dissertation, God unites individuals, although now Feuerbach likens it more to love: in loving one another, humans lose their distinct individuality and merge into a wider community of persons. Indeed, God exists just through such a process of mortals losing their own individuality, in other words, by constant death of new human beings - God is the unity behind everything variable.

Such a pantheistic notion of God does not then leave any room for personal immortality, Feuerbach insists. Only in this particular life exists this particular human being, and when that life ends, there is nothing sensuous left of this person (thoughts about this person do remain, but these are not individual). If a person would continue to exist as an individual, it would have to exist somewhere, but where could this place be?

Feuerbach does consider the possibility that life after death would continue on other planets and stars, but ultimately refuses it. Life must have its spatial limits, in addition to temporal limits, that is, Feuerbach insists, there can be no life beyond Earth. His line of argument is very flimsy: life on other planets couldn’t be equally perfect to ours - nature shouldn’t just repeat things - but there couldn’t be life less perfect than the least perfect life on Earth - then it wouldn’t even be life - nor life more perfect than the most perfect life on Earth - what could be more perfect than thinking? Still, one cannot but laugh at Feuerbach’s idea that making stars into homes of reborn humans would just turn space into a comfortable hotel. Instead, he suggests, stars are not creations of utility, but are dreams of a still youthful nature.

Another point speaking against personal immortality, Feuerbach continues, is that individual life is always embodied. Spirit or God does live without a body - it is the process, where bodies are generated and destroyed - but an individual person cannot. Indeed, Feuerbach points out, when we think of an individual's immortality, we think of the soul as a kind of body, trapped in another body. Yet, he continues, soul is not a body nor is it even an individual thing, but an activity of living, just like fire is an activity in a burning body. And like fire stops, when a thing is burned up, soul vanishes when the body dies.

Feuerbach also relies on the Hegelian idea that a limit of something does not just end something, but also makes it what it is. In other words, mortality just is what makes us human beings what we are. This is nothing to be afraid of, he adds, since when this limit of ours or death is present, we are not. What death adds to our life is meaning, just like a melody adds meaning to fleeting sounds.

The analogue to melody in human life is the common memory of humankind, Feuerbach suggests. The first years of our life is something that we learn of only from the memories of other persons. Our own individual personality is thus something made by humanity outside us. The whole of our life is then a steady creation of more memories, which could be transmitted to other persons and thus universalised. When the process has finished, we still exist in spirit, as these idealised memories.

Günther, Anthon: Preschool to speculative theology of positive Christianity. First part: Theory of creation (1828)

 

1783 -1863

A controversy surrounding pantheism (or atheism and Spinozism, as it was first called) has been a mainstay of German philosophy since at least the time of Christian Wolff, and ever new generations of philosophers have faced the condemnation of having breached the lines of orthodox Christianity. In Anton Günther’s Vorschule zur speculativen Theologie des positiven Christenthums it is the generation of Schelling and Hegel that faces now the same accusation.

Günther’s aim is to defend Christianity and to show how the new philosophies fail to understand its basic tenets. At the same time as Günther is criticising them, he is also clearly influenced by some of the ideas of the other German philosophers, in ways that resemble Coleridge’s new reading of the idea of trinity.

Günther’s book is structured as an exchange of letters between a theology student and his uncle, who is afraid that the nephew has fallen to pantheist thinking. The evidence for this suspicion lies in certain theses reminiscent of ideas common to many of the idealist thinkers of the time. In these theses, philosophy is regarded as a single entity, developing throughout history through various relatively true philosophical systems. Furthermore, philosophy is here regarded as having essentially the same mission as religion, and in addition, as bridging two different phases of religion: an undeveloped awareness of divine in feeling would have been supplanted by Greek realistic and polytheistic philosophy and Greek philosophy would have been superseded by Christian idealistic philosophy, which would finally lead to an age of reasoned consciousness of God, where philosophy would not be needed anymore and wise humanity would rule over all nature and create a new heaven.

Nephew then defends himself that despite his conviction that philosophy will lead to a new understanding of God, he does not think that this would necessarily imply supplanting Christianity with pantheism. Indeed, he insists that theism is an equally valid way to do philosophy.

Nephew outlines his position in more detail by dividing all possible philosophical systems into two kinds: critical philosophy begins with the faculty of cognition and takes care of not overstepping its limits, while transcendent philosophy does precisely what critical warns against and starts from what is absolute. He specifies this rather Kantian division by noting that transcendent philosophy describes the relation between absolute and relative being in terms of substance and its accidental modifications. Critical philosophy, on the other hand, tries to - again in Kantian terms - leave room for faith in matters pertaining to things outside cognition.

The student makes an even more intricate division of philosophical systems, although only in a footnote. Uncle is not that impressed with it, noting that all philosophical systems are in a sense critical, because they all must begin with some facts of consciousness, and at the same time also transcendent, because absolute or God is always one of these facts of consciousness.

His own understanding of philosophy is built around several oppositions. One of them is the primary opposition between absolute and relative being, by which uncle means, effectively, God and the world. Another opposition lies within the relative being, that is, opposition of nature and spirit. A third opposition cuts across the second opposition: in both nature and spirit we can differentiate between accidental or phenomenal appearances and their substance or noumenal ground. Furthermore, he finds yet another opposition between the phenomena multiplicity and the noumenal unity: both natural and spiritual appearances can be reduced to two opposed forces. One of these forces is always passive - in case of nature, contraction, in case of spirit, receptivity - while the other is active - respectively, expansion and spontaneity.

All of these opposed concepts are familiar from Kantian and post-Kantian discussions. Uncle - the probable voice of Günther himself - notes that they are also among the facts of consciousness, from which philosophy should begin. For instance, uncle notes that in our self-consciousness we are conscious of ourselves as spirit, but also of something distinct from us and spirit, that is, nature. By studying both spiritual and natural phenomena, uncle suggests, we can find the basic forces behind them. Uncle points out that this already leads us from accidental variability to more stable and substantial level; even more apparent this substance behind phenomena is to us in our experience of ourselves as a stable unity behind individual experiences. Finally, we are aware of ourselves being conditioned, which then requires the assumption of something that can exist just by itself.

Basic question of philosophy, uncle suggests, has always been to explain how these various components of experience are related to one another, and different systems have a different answer. Some of them concentrate on the relation between nature and spirit, like naturalism, which take substance of spirit be just an effect and a product of substance of nature, spiritualism, where the roles are reversed and the substance of nature emanates from the substance of spirit, hylozoism, where the two are identified, and dualism, where the two substances differ, but interact. Some philosophical systems try to settle the relation of natural and spiritual appearances, like sensualism, which takes all spiritual phenomena to be caused by natural phenomena and therefore raises the status of senses, or intellectualism, which takes the opposite stand and states that the world of experience must be a product of our representations.

The more important question in Günther’s schema concerns the question about the relationship between absolute and relative worlds, and it is here especially where the character of uncle finds evidence for his pantheism accusations. Some systems regard nature and spirit as mere accidents of divine substance: following tradition, uncle calls this acosmic pantheism, because this system denies the existence of any world distinct from God. In a sense opposed to this is what the uncle calls cosmic pantheism, where God is just the goal to be actualised through world history, which is then a process of God’s self-revelation. Further forms of pantheism the uncle mentions hold God or absolute to be spatiality (monadistic pantheism, where all becoming is mere illusion), temporality (compared to previous, all stability is here illusion), substantially identical with nature (pantheistic naturalism, where nature is revelation of divinity) or substantially identical with human spirit (here human spirit is just a limited mode of God and nature this limitation, and God is revealed through the system of finite spirits). With all of this evidence before him, uncle concludes that pantheism is a necessary result, when philosophy attempts to describe the relation of God to nature and spirit.

Nephew objects that there is still some room for a non-pantheist philosophy, where God is described as a creator of the world, creation being an external relation between God and nature. He does concede that creation cannot be handled theoretically, because it is based on God’s unconditioned, free causality, which cannot be conceptualised. Creation is still justified on practical grounds, because it is the only possible basis of ethical freedom.

The basic idea of creation, nephew says, presupposes that there is a world distinct from God and God distinct from the world. World can, he admits, be said to be in God, but only in the sense that God thinks even possible worlds. In addition to this, world still needs to receive existence, which is based on a free act of God. At the same time, nephew says, God reveals himself as the most perfect entity through the world to other, less perfect entities outside him, who are capable of knowing and loving God and so taking part in his blessedness. These less perfect entities or spirits God has created as his likeness, but not as equal to him.

Nephew also makes a Kantian distinction between the sense world and the intelligible world. The sense world is only the manner in which the intelligible world appears to finite spirits, thus, God has no real relation to the sense world. Because spatiality is the property of the sense world, God is not in any spatial relation to the real world. Still, nephew insists, God is outside the world in the sense that he is not finite.

Uncle notes that nephew’s model of creation resembles the system presented in Vorschule der Theologie (note the similarity with the name of this book), written by I. H. Fichte, son of the more famous J. G. Fichte. In Fichte’s system, as presented by Günther, absolute realises itself by giving independent existence to a difference implicit in it and forming a sort of body to itself through its self-division. Absolute retains and knows its unity in and through its division and is thus a self-conscious God only because of creation. The divisions are in the fashion of Leibnizian monadology themselves relative absolutes or self-contained universes and therefore also self-conscious personalities.

The concept of relative absolute reminds the nephew of another recent philosophical work, by Georg Friedrich Daumer. Daumer’s starting point, nephew tells, is an idea found in Schelling’s essay on freedom that God himself had a basis or ground in an ultimate, featureless indifference, on top of which divine self-consciousness was built. For Daumer, nephew says, God is always self-conscious and this indifference is more like something divinity rips out of itself - the relative absolute - and makes into a basis of finite world. In effect, this Daumerian relative absolute is a blind generating force that searches for its own self-consciousness and eventual reconciliation with God.

Nephew uses the Daumerian idea to solve a fault he finds in Fichte’s system, where there appears to be no place for nature outside self-conscious subjects. Nephew notes that most post-Kantian philosophers have taken nature as a dynamic whole and thus something real. If Fichte were right, nature would then also form a self-conscious subject and would be on the same level as human spirits, which the nephew cannot accept. His own idea was to take nature as a mere shadow of true reality, but now Daumer has given him a new idea - if nature is just this blind relative absolute, humanity is still on a higher level, because it does not just strive, but can also reach back to God. The only worry nephew now has is that it seems to restrict God’s omnipotence, if he can never create something truly different from himself, but only modifications of divinity - when God creates, he should not be just positing his own essence.

It is time for the uncle to lead the student away from the quagmire he has got himself into. The first target of uncle’s criticism is nephew’s Kantianism, evident especially in latter’s insistence that spatial sense world was nothing real and that God had nothing to do with it. Günther goes into more detail with Kant’s idea of space and time as a priori forms of experience in an appendix, where he balances Kantianism with Aristotle’s objective notion of space and time and both with Augustine’s manner of grounding space and time to God. In the main book, uncle merely notes that while it was right to say that worldly and therefore spatial relations do not concern God, it is wrong to insist that no relation holds between God and the spatial world. He also adds that Kant’s attempt to make room for faith actually managed to just set faith aside somewhere where it could be forgotten.

Uncle also notes that Fichte’s system is essentially another form of pantheism, because - as the nephew had feared - in it God just multiplies itself or posits other absolutes similar to itself. He also notes, making fun of the idea mentioned in the beginning about apparently different philosophies being just phases in the development of one philosophy, that pantheism, as exemplified by Fichte’s system, and Kant-inspired criticism, as exemplified by nephew’s system, are more like eternal rivals, neither of which can be seen as development of the other. Ultimately, the decision between the two systems boils down to the question whether facts of self-consciousness should weigh more than demands of reason. Human self-consciousness is inevitably bound to a consciousness of something else limiting us - nature - and thus to an inevitable dualism between finite or relative and infinite or absolute being. Then again, our reason strives to reduce everything into a unified whole and to envision the relative world as a revelation of absolute. Although not yet spelling it out, uncle hints of a possibility of a third option more satisfying than either criticism or pantheism.

Uncle also makes short shrift of Daumer’s position. At first, he quickly dismisses Schelling’s essay of freedom, which influences Daumer, by noting that Schelling introduces without any justification dualism within absolute, thus, making it into relative being. Daumer himself, uncle continues, makes again the pantheistic assumption that God can only posit something similar to itself (relative absolute) and that God needs the world for its own self-consciousness.

We then get an interlude with nephew’s letter, where he notes the similarity of his time with the time of Neoplatonists and Church Fathers. He suggests that just like Neoplatonism was a syncretist hodgepodge of various mystery religions and mythologies covered with magical superstition, modern idealism is also a similar confusion of oriental pantheism with mysticism of intellectual intuition. Furthermore, nephew insists that whereas Church Fathers appropriated from Neoplatonism all that was worthwhile (especially the notion of supersensuous world above the world of senses) and added solid historical background in the form of Bible, the task now ahead is to take what is useful in modern pantheistic idealism and give it again a solid grounding in Christianity.

Uncle takes up this challenge by picking as the important result of modern idealism the analysis of self-consciousness. Consciousness as such unites two distinct moments: what is represented and what represents. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness, in which representing subject makes itself its own object. Immediately subject can know only its activities or interactions with some objects, while it can know its substance or essence only through the mediation of these activities: in the words of a common analogy, eye can see or be aware of itself only through the seeing of other things.

God, the uncle continues, should also have self-consciousness, although it is one of a peculiar kind, because it is absolute. Still, even God must have something as its object, before being capable of self-consciousness. Unlike human consciousness, God can simply posit its own essence as its own object. At the same time, it must posit a common substance for God as subject and God as object. In a manner very reminiscent of Coleridge uncle states that this threefold structure of divine self-consciousness is what Christianity has called trinity. In other words, God necessarily emanates three persons from himself in order to know itself.

Self-revelation of absolute, which reason required for completing its demands, happens then already at the level where only God exists, because God posits its own essence as a new object. Question is why God would still create something other beyond himself and his persons. Uncle concludes that God’s goal must have been to reveal himself to someone else who is not God.

Within the created realm, uncle continues, nature and spirit share similarities, but on a more substantial level they differ and oppose one another. Thus, both nature and spirit are based on a pair of opposed forces and their underlying unity, but with nature these two forces are necessarily related (action and reaction), while with spirit spontaneity need not correspond with the receptive side of human mind, and thus, spirit can freely rise above what it senses. Spirit and nature cannot then be reduced to one another and also not to any indifferent substance underlying them. Their opposition is also not based on their combination, which is just as finite and relative as both of them, namely, humanity as a combination of spirit and body. Their existence, uncle concludes, can then be based only on something third above them, which has created them.

God is then something completely different from both nature and spirit, uncle says, and completely incommensurable with them. In a sense, God is even opposed to finite creatures. God has a unified essence and substance, which appears in three essential forms. World, on the other hand, contains three different kinds of substances (nature, spirit and their combination or humanity), but they all share the same form of revealing their substance through a dualism of basic forces. Still, uncle points out, both the world as a whole and individual created beings can be regarded as God’s images - individual creatures are relative absolutes, since they have life principles that work as a foundation of a sum of appearances, while the world as a whole is a trinity of substances.

Nephew’s final letter starts by recounting traditional properties of God, such as his omnipotence, omniscience and love, all of which are essential reasons why God created the world and how he could do it. He notes that some philosophers deem such properties too anthropomorphic, while only accepting spirit as God's characterisation. Nephew points out that it would be actually better to distinguish spirit as a finite entity from God as absolute - although God is not necessary, like nature, he is also not free in the sense of finite spirit.

He then turns to the question, whether human reason can by itself know that God exists. He notes that philosophers have had two positions on the topic. First position insists that reason has in its own self-consciousness also an immediate mystical awareness of divinity. Nephew cannot accept this position, because it is an obvious fallback to the pantheist position, where humans and God are identified. The second position, on the other hand, accepts that we have only mediate knowledge of God, but suggests that this is possible only if God comes and directly interacts with us. Nephew is skeptical, whether knowledge requires such a direct interaction with its object - we can deduce the existence of absolute even from the awareness of ourselves as conditioned entities.

A related problem concerns the role of faith in getting to know absolute. The prominent opinion, as the nephew points out, was that faith had at least something to do with it. One party, endorsing the idea of reason having a immediate connection to God, identified this immediate connection with faith and insisted that only this immediate cognition or faith was required, while understanding as mediate cognition was dependent on immediate cognition and could only be of use in the multiplicity of the sense world. Understanding and its traditional proofs of God’s existence could still enliven faith in us, even if they really couldn’t prove anything. The opposing party insisted that understanding has something to do with cognition of divine: faith was created in us by God’s interaction with us and understanding was required for refining it into cognition through traditional proofs of God’s existence. Nephew points out that both parties have tried to find an immediate connection with God, one through its own self-consciousness, other through God’s interaction with us. Yet, both must admit that understanding and its mediate, conceptual thinking is required for knowing God, since immediately we can know only our own states, but not what produces them.

In the concluding letter of the book, uncle congratulates the nephew for endorsing two controversial ideas. First of these is the idea that God is properly speaking not a spirit. True, God has similarities to spirits: both are non-material and have self-consciousness. Still, they both have widely different essences, just like animals and humans do not share their essence, although both have the capacities to sense and imagine.

The second controversial position is that we can know God even without direct connection to him. The opponents of this idea insist that only similarities between the knower and the known make knowing possible. Uncle points out that this would make it impossible for us to ever know things of nature, which have a different essence from us. He points out the possible objection that humans can know nature through their bodily side, but rejects it instantly by noting that it ignores the unity of human self-consciousness - it is not the eye that sees, but the self-conscious human using the eye.

Uncle notes that the principle of similars knowing similars has a true kernel: we must know something similar to ourselves, that is, we must be conscious of ourselves, before we can know anything else. Still, this does not mean that we have to turn in something else in order to know its existence. Furthermore, the knowledge of God provided by our knowing the conditionedness of ourselves is only theoretical knowledge of absolute. If we truly want to know God as God or his personality, uncle concludes, we must know him also through hearing him speak to us through our conscience.