Life of Jesus (1835–1836/1864)

1808–1874

David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu was a seminal work in Bible scholarship, yet, as Strauss himself says, theologians of the time reacted negatively to it – whether for the reason Strauss himself surmises, that is, a fear of losing their own halo of holiness, is unclear. The negative reception of professionals made Strauss finally publish a more condensed and less scholarly version of his work for the wider audience. Strauss considered himself to be continuing the work of Luther in removing the final crude superstitious elements, which he attributed to Jewish influence, from the purely spiritual Christianity that Strauss envisioned was the mission of German people to endorse.

Strauss notes in his work that the very idea of studying the life of Jesus is rather modern. Sure, Church Fathers did try to e.g. weave a consistent story of the wondering of Jesus, as presented in the gospels, but it was not the human life of Jesus so much as his supposed divinity and his role in the overall salvation of human race that really mattered to them. In fact, Strauss states, the very idea of the life of Jesus is somewhat contradictory, when life is something essentially human, but Jesus is understood as divine. No wonder then, he points out in going through works of his predecessors, that there has been a growing tendency to a demystification of the life of Jesus, for instance, by interpreting the supposed miracles of Jesus as natural events.

When it comes to the sources of the life of Jesus – that is, the four gospels – Strauss notes that they are mentioned rather late, all four no earlier than in Irenaeus (from the latter half of the second century). The remaining passages of the works of Papias (from the first half second century) do mention gospels written by Matthew and Mark, but it is unclear whether they are the same gospels we know of. Before these references, Strauss continues, we really have nothing certain. Apostolic fathers use sayings similar to those found in gospels, but these could be part of an oral tradition, while Justin the Martyr does acknowledge the existence of writings on Jesus and quotes some saying and parts of the life of Jesus, but his quotes do not often line up with the gospels we know of, suggesting that the four we know might not have been the only ones in circulation.

Strauss notes that for a long time it has been clear that the first three gospels – the so-called synoptic gospels – form a distinct group with obvious similarities. They are not identical, and some differences could be explained by the different perspectives of their authors, but Strauss points out that factual differences, for instance, in the geographical details of the journeys of Jesus were more difficult to account for.

After a careful consideration of the theological traditions, Strauss comes to the conclusion that the gospel of Matthew must be the earliest of the synoptic gospels. Even Matthew was still not written by Matthew or by any true eyewitness – this is proven by, for instance, duplication of tales with similar motifs, suggesting that the author had heard two different accounts and inserted both of them to his writing, just to be sure. Strauss thinks that Matthew has the most faithful account of the speeches and works of Jesus, although it does have its share of unbelievable miracles, like corpses arising from their graves after the death of Jesus. The main evidence for the early state of Matthew is, Strauss says, that the attitude of the gospel is still very close to Jewish traditions, although there are some clear later additions, like the reference to trinitarian divinity.

Although Matthew is the earliest, Strauss argues, it is still far from reliable and authors of other synoptic gospels might have had contact with historical sources that were not available to the author of Matthew. This is evident, he continues, in Luke, which clearly uses Matthew as a source, but also contains much of its own material. Strauss notes that the author of Luke (and of the Acts of the Apostles) was clearly a learned Greek who wanted to make his gospel an artistic whole, for instance, by dividing Matthew’s sermon of mount into more manageable pieces and by replacing Matthew’s story of the childhood of Jesus with his own. What belies the later date of Luke, Strauss thinks, is the more universalist attitude of the gospel and the tendency evident especially in the Acts to try to reconcile the Jewish and the Greek branches of early Christianity.

Modern hermeneutics usually sees Mark as the earliest synoptic gospel, but Strauss has a widely different opinion. For him, Mark is just a more prosaic summary of Matthew, adding also some passages summarising Luke. Strauss envisions the gospel of Mark having been written for liturgic purposes as a succinct retelling of the major events in the life of Jesus. Mark’s attitude is, Strauss suggests, universalist like Luke’s, but Mark shows this tendency more in omissions, for instance, by removing Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus, which connected Jesus with David’s family line (a consideration more important for Christians with Jewish heritage).

This leaves out only the gospel of John, and Strauss notes that many modern readers, like Schleiermacher, had wanted to see it as the original gospel with an eyewitness as its author. Yet, Strauss makes it clear, the gospel must be considerably late, because it shows Gnostic tendencies, especially in its divinisation of Jesus as a pre-existent Logos. Thus, he concludes, John contains very little that is historically reliable and not found in other gospels, but he also understands why it has been regarded as so central by the modern readers: the gospel of John emphasised the subjective element of faith, so important for the German romantics.

Since gospels are clearly not fully historical documents, Strauss underlines, we can assume that there is a lot of mythical in them. This is especially true of miracles, that is, events inexplicable by finite causes, which thus appear to be immediate effects of the highest cause or God, done for the purpose of effecting God’s will in the world and for making people believe in God. Strauss is adamant: a historian cannot accept miracles, or if they accept biblical miracles, they should accept also miracles in all religions. He thinks that no proper philosophy can accept miracles. This is clearly true of materialism, which does not accept even the existence of God. Furthermore, a pantheist, identifying the world with God, cannot believe that God could act against laws of the world, which by consequence are then laws of God. Even consequent theism, Strauss thinks, admits that it would be against the wisdom of God to use miracles instead of ordinary natural laws for divine purposes. Even if the stories of miracles in Bible were told by eyewitnesses, Strauss, thinks, they would still be unbelievable, or at least we wouldn’t believe anyone who would nowadays state they had seen miracles.

Tales of miracles by Jesus are then best understood as myths, Strauss concludes. People were waiting for the Messiah, he explains, some believed Jesus was this Messiah, more and more people started believing it, then people started thinking that Jesus had made the same sort of miracles as earlier prophets had: similar process has happened in all religions. In addition to such unconscious myth making, Strauss suggests, gospels might contain even conscious fabrications, and this is especially true of the final one attributed to John. Strauss aims at first to unravel the original kernel of historical Jesus behind all the myths and then show how the myths have been applied like layers on top of this kernel. We shall return to the latter task of Strauss in the next post and now concentrate on the first one.

Strauss begins by describing the Judaist and Greco-Roman cultures that formed the context for the activities of Jesus. Starting with the Jews, Strauss noted that they had for a long time identified themselves as the people who knew the only true God and who were chosen by this God, but also punished for worshiping other gods. The Jews did retain the practice of animal sacrifice, common to their neighbours, but the prophets already noticed a basic contradiction that an unseen God should not care for sacrifices. They did not abandon the practice completely, but they did speak for a more spiritual behaviour as a path toward the former glory of the Israel nation – thus began the wait for the Messiah.

After the Maccabee rebellion, Strauss continues, three sects arose among the Jews. Firstly, there were the puristically Judaist Pharisees, reacting against Greco-Roman conquerors, like German romantics had reacted against the Napoleonic forces. Secondly, there was the enlightened upper class of Sadducees, with a Stoic tendency for doing good for good’s sake and an Epicurean tendency of renouncing the afterlife. Finally, there were the ascetic Essenes, resembling the later Ebionite sect of early Christianity, who Strauss considers might have been influenced by the Neo-Pythagorean school in Egypt. Besides these three schools, Strauss also mentions the Alexandrian Jews, like Philo, who married Judaism with Platonist doctrine of ideas and spoke of Logos as the divine reason.

One might think that the Greco-Roman mythology was far removed from the Judaist notion of one God, but Strauss argues that Greek gods were still more universal than Asian, since they had a human and not animal form. This idea seems something Strauss borrowed from the Hegelian school, and the same is probably true of what he says about the development of Greek philosophy. Thus, Strauss mentions Socrates, whom he considers being similar to Jesus in his emphasis on morality, endorsement of monotheism and tragic end. Plato, Strauss continues, made Greek culture even more compliant with Judaism by his idea of good, which he identified with God, emphasis on a world beyond what is perceived and identification of virtue with true happiness. Aristotle, Strauss thinks, followed Plato in essentials, just concentrating more on the experience, while Stoics emphasised the independence of virtue and were also the first philosophical school with the whole humanity as a universal object. Epicureans seemed to oppose Stoics, but agreed on identifying virtue as means to true happiness. Skepticism reacted against the multiplicity of philosophical schools and also destroyed the native polytheistic faith, which opened the way for Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonism. Strauss concludes his account by noting that Rome united the known world and made Greek philosophy practical.

Another important figure for the context of the life of Jesus, Strauss thinks, is John the Baptist, who resembled Essenes in forming a sort of middle state between Judaism and Christianity. John the Baptist was waiting for Messiah, but Strauss thinks he probably didn’t believe that Jesus was him, since his sect continued even after Jesus began his own mission.

Strauss is convinced that all tales of the birth and youth of Jesus in the gospels are unhistorical. Then again, Strauss adds, we can consider it highly probable that Jesus was from Nazareth in Galilee, that his father was a carpenter called Joseph and his mother was called Mary and that he had brothers and sisters, some of whom were also among his disciples. Furthermore, Strauss notes, there is no indication that Jesus was a descendant of David. Strauss also finds in gospels no reliable information on the upbringing and education of Jesus. Strauss surmises that Jesus might have been self-educated on theological matters and that he might have had some inkling of the Greco-Roman culture, since Galilee was a more cosmopolitan environment than Judea. Strauss takes it to be very probable that Jesus was a pupil of John the Baptist, since his teachings do bear a striking similarity with that of John’s.

Jesus did not at first set himself out as the Messiah, Strauss argues, but merely as a preacher. The religious ideas of Jesus, Strauss thinks, are best expressed in the Sermon on Mount: it is not the earthly goods that make people satisfied, but spiritual awakening, which Jesus interprets according to his time as afterlife. In other words, while Moses had given laws for external actions, Jesus stated laws for internal attitudes, endorsing the notion of universal love shown to everyone. Similarly, Strauss emphasises, the God of Jesus was not the judge of the Old Testament, but a loving father, while humans were his children and siblings of one another. These convictions gave Jesus a carefree attitude toward the external side of life, expressed well in his statement that birds in the sky do not care for tomorrow. Strauss notices an interesting tension between this naturalness of the way Jesus lived, compared with the spiritual struggles of later famous Christians, like Paul, Augustine and Luther.

Strauss thinks of Jesus as a reformator of Judaism. Jesus was, he says, against the rules Pharisees had introduced on top of what had been clearly written in Torah. Then again, the attitude of Jesus toward the very law within Torah was more ambiguous. Jesus did say, Strauss notes, that he did not want to reject the law, but he did want to make it more internal (for instance, it is not just the act of adultery that should be rejected, but even the very desire for adultery). Then again, Strauss points out, Jesus was clearly careless about the ritual offerings and ceremonies, probably because they were mere external covering for the true good. Gospels seem even more inconsistent about the attitudes of Jesus toward non-Jews, but Strauss surmises that as a resident of Galilee he would have encountered at least Samaritans and thus would have had more positive ideas about them than an average person from Judaea.

Strauss points out that Jesus never declared himself to be David’s descendant in the gospels and reacted even ironically to the notion, since the Messiah should be more important than David was. Jesus also never directly called himself the son of God, which at that time meant nothing more than a holy man sent by God. Then again, Strauss admits, Jesus did not reject the epithet, if someone described him thus. Still, what Jesus mostly described himself to be was a son of man. Originally, Strauss states, this title referred to an ordinary human being, but at least in the book of Daniel it was used of a Messiah-like figure. Yet, Strauss surmises, even if Jesus was thus implying that he was the Messiah, his disciples seem not to have picked the latter reference

In any case, Strauss thinks, Jesus was never interested in the political and national side of the notion of Messiah. This was not completely unprecedented, Strauss states, because some prophets spoke of a Messiah-like figure that was more of a teacher than a warrior, for instance, Isaiah, when introducing the servant of God. An important element in Isaiah’s notion was that the servant of God was to suffer: usually he was interpreted to speak of the whole nation of Israel, but the servant could be seen as a single, Messianic person. Strauss surmises that the more Jesus encountered resistance from his fellow Jews, the more he saw his role to be sacrificing himself for others

Strauss notes that Jesus apparently spoke of rising from death, and although he sometimes clearly meant a spiritual afterlife and not physical resurrection, he did occasionally refer to his return on Earth. This is problematic for Strauss, since if Jesus meant such things literally, he would have been either a fraud or a religious fanatic. Strauss explains some of these statements as later additions, since they show Jesus prophesying about things happening after his life. Furthermore, Strauss notes, when Jesus spoke of his coming back in the kingdom of heaven, he most likely thought that the world around us would eventually change into a new, heavenly form, due to his own teachings, and that he would return to the world in this altered state, ruling it with his followers.

Strauss likens the method of teaching Jesus used to that of Socrates, as both moved from house to house and spoke to anyone who would listen to them. Jesus apparently restricted his wanderings for a long time to Galilee, at least according to the synoptic gospels, and although it might seem odd that such a pious person would not have visited Jerusalem regularly, Strauss ponders, he might have wanted at first to distance himself from the Pharisee-led Judea and travelled there only when he had gathered enough followers. His style was that of a common person and he liked using parables, which Strauss thinks is a clear sign of the inauthenticity of John’s gospel, which prefers allegories, lacking the narrative element of the parables.

Strauss thinks it was just natural the Jews would expect Jesus to prove that he was sent by God through performing miracles similar to those made by prophets of old. At times Jesus appeared to ridicule this expectation, especially when talking to Pharisees, by referring to obstinate folk who required proof to believe. Still, Strauss notes, he was eventually rumored to have miraculous powers, making people try to touch his clothes to gain healing – such belief was not uncommon in ancient times, when famous people were in question. Strauss surmises that Jesus might have even performed faith healings, especially of those who were thought to be possessed, who suffered most likely from psychological illnesses. Still, Strauss is convinced that Jesus could not have broken the laws of nature.

Like John the Baptist, Jesus gathered around himself some disciples. Strauss finds it convincing that Jesus picked himself twelve disciples, corresponding to twelve tribes of Israel. Then again, Strauss thinks that Jesus surely did not yet order his disciples to spread his teachings. Strauss finds it uncertain whether there was any betrayer among disciples, as indeed, Paul does not yet know of such a person among the twelve. Furthermore, Strauss thinks it is doubtful whether the disciples really understood Jesus. Strauss is also convinced that Jesus wasn’t divinised by the disciples, which seems to have been the idea of Paul.

Strauss can find no certain information about what Jesus hoped to accomplish in visiting Jerusalem. It could have been that at this point Jesus was convinced that he was surrounded by enemies, that he would be killed and that this killing was a sacrifice necessary for the coming of the kingdom of God. Perhaps he then might have felt the need to ask his disciples to commemorate his last day on earth with bread and wine, but it could also be that the disciples just started to commemorate the death of Jesus with this tradition. Still, Strauss notes, it is quite believable that his coming to Jerusalem was so tumultuous that it gained the attention of the Jewish and Roman authorities, leading to a capture and crucifixion of Jesus.

While some writers had suggested that Jesus might have experienced just a false death, making the supposed resurrection a natural event, Strauss dismisses this suggestion, because in such a weak state Jesus would not have awakened enough awe to make disciples consider him the Messiah – besides, what would have happened to Jesus afterwards? Strauss is also not satisfied in merely saying that it is only the belief in resurrection by disciples that is important for a historian.

Instead, Strauss argues on the basis of contradictions in the gospels that the most reliable account of how the disciples must have experienced the resurrection comes from Paul, who certainly believed he had seen and heard Jesus, but in a way that is clearly interpretable as a subjective vision. It is likely, Strauss continues, that the immediate disciples of Jesus had similar experiences, after returning to Galilee where they were used to seeing Jesus. Such visions were a natural effect of the stress of their experiences and even more probable because of the fact that some of the disciples most likely had psychical afflictions that made them susceptible to them (for instance, Mary Magdalene, who was supposedly cured from being possessed).

Ludwig Feuerbach: Critique of “Anti-Hegel’s” for introduction in the study of philosophy (1835)

Reading the works of early Feuerbach incites a cozy feeling in a Hegel-connoisseur: it’s that instant recognition that you are talking with a person who really knows and understands his Hegel – a very rare experience when reading books on Hegel. The occasion of Feuerbach’s article I am now reading is the book Anti-Hegel by Carl Friedrich Bachmann, a former student and a later critic of Hegel’s. Feuerbach is not intrinsically against the idea of criticising Hegel – or indeed any philosophy – as long as the criticism is intrinsic to the kernel of that philosophy, just like, Feuerbach thinks, Plato was able to criticise Parmenides and Spinoza Descartes. What such intrinsic criticism achieves, according to Feuerbach, is to reveal the limitations of the criticised philosophy.

Bachmann’s criticism, Feuerbach insists, is not intrinsic in this sense, but based on mere misunderstandings. Such a negative criticism does not turn against the limitations, but the very philosophical core, replacing it with one’s own ideas. Thus, Feuerbach gives an example, Bachmann confuses the Hegelian notion of identity as unity between two seemingly different things with mere sameness involving no difference, so that when Hegel is e.g. speaking of the identity of logic and metaphysics, meaning that our knowledge is intrinsically connected with the world around it, Bachmann sees nothing but mere confusion of two separate disciplines.

The main target of Bachmann’s criticism, according to Feuerbach, is Hegel’s notion of idea, which Bachmann regards as meaning nothing but a universal concept or genus, although Hegel’s own examples of idea are topics like life, knowledge and will – organic and mental processes. Armed with his own reading, Bachmann goes on to insist that Hegel is inconsistent in saying that nature in its idea is divine, but still does not correspond to its concept. What Hegel means, Feuerbach explains, is simply that nature is a mere determined modification of this divine idea – an organic outgrowth, one might say – and as such a modification not the most perfect form in which this divine idea appears.

More generally, Feuerbach explains, every determined idea – say, that of family – comes with its own criteria for the perfection of its exemplifications, making it hence understandable how there can be e.g. bad families, which still are in a sense families. Adding another example, Feuerbach notes that we do not deny that the essence of humanity lies in reason, just because there happen to exist stupid people. Thus, unlike Bachmann insists, we need not first empirically study what all concrete families are like, in order to describe the idea of a family, but instead, the idea of family is something we use to evaluate individual families – of course, this idea is also embodied in concrete examples, but not in bad, but in good families. Despite the idea being embodied, Feuerbach adds, this sensuous embodiment is not really of interest in comparison with the idea: for instance, when looking at a true work of art, the most important thing in it is the idea of art shining through in this painting, statue or whatever.

In addition to the notion of idea, Bachmann criticises Hegel’s notion that the history of philosophy would form a development, where the latest specimen contained all its predecessors: instead, Bachmann insists, history of philosophy has been just a random appearance of opinions contradicting one another. Feuerbach notes that Bachmann has simply misunderstood the manner in which the earlier philosophies are contained in the later ones, because integration into a more intricate system requires modification of the details of the original. Taking as an example Kant, whom Bachmann considered as evidence for his own position, since Kant famously rejected all previous metaphysics, Feuerbach argues that you can instead find traces of several predecessors in Kant’s philosophy, including skepticism of David Hume and apriorism of Leibniz. Indeed, Feuerbach sees Bachmann’s misunderstanding as a further proof that the latter cannot remove himself from the realm of mere sensuousness, where e.g. water of Thales clearly differs from air of Anaximenes.

Bachmann uses the familiar phenomena of sleeping, diseases affecting our capacity to think etc. as a proof that what Hegel called spirit is actually of material nature. Feuerbach notes that Bachmann’s examples reveal more the difference between individual human beings, who do have their material side, and the spirit as the universally on-going process of thinking, which individual human beings struggle to come in contact with. True, human beings sleep without being conscious or thinking, Feuerbach admits, but never do they all sleep at the same time. Furthermore, he adds, what awakens consciousness in us is the stimulus provided by our fellow human beings, connecting us to the on-going flow of spirit or humanity. In the best cases, we as individuals are guided by this spirit or one of its ideas, such as the idea of art and beauty are guiding true artists.

Connected to this idea of humans being guided by ideas is Hegel’s (according to Feuerbach) metaphoric statement that his own Logic as the construction of such ideas or categories describes the thinking of God before creation of the concrete world. Bachmann makes fun of this notion by identifying God with various categories of Hegelian Logic. Feuerbach insists that Bachmann is simply confused: Hegel noted that only some categories could be predicated of God and he never drew the ridiculous conclusion that the physical copy of his Logic is the very God. Instead, Feuerbach notes, Hegel’s Logic is a mere reconstruction of divine self-consciousness for  the sake of individual human beings.

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.

Louis Eugène Marie Bautain: Philosophy of Christianity (1835)

(1796–1867)

Bautain is again not one of those names you are likely to hear in a course on 19th century philosophy: Catholic conservatives do not fit well in the tale of progression toward modernity. His Philosophie du Christianisme adds an interesting layer to a typical dialogue between philosophy and Christianity, as it represents also a dialogue between Catholicism and Judaism. The historical context of the book is a surge of Jewish converts in France, a number of which act as characters in the book, structured as a series of letters between these converts and Bautain. In fact, these characters apparently were real historical personages, who begin the book by telling the story of their conversion.

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.

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.

Carl Friedrich Göschel: Of the proof for the immortality of the human soul (1835)

Last time we saw Göschel, he was busy explaining his own take of the intricacies of the whole Hegelian system. In the work we are now dealing with, Von den Beweisen für die Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele, he grapples with a special question of how to prove the immortality of human soul. His fundamental line of defence is again his reading of Hegelianism, which he mostly calls speculative philosophy, but he does point in this work to many other philosophers, using even thinkers like Spinoza and Kant to find arguments for his own understanding of what to expect after death.

Göschel is clearly very fond of analogies, and one of the two most important ones presented in this book is that between the three traditional proofs for God’s existence – a division going ultimately back to Kant, but viewed as being reimagined by Hegel – and what Göschel takes as three fundamental proofs for the immortality of human soul (fundamental in the sense that all other proofs should be mere variations or combinations of these three proofs). Göschel knows his Hegelese and adds at once that these three proofs are not enough, because they are part of pre-Kantian dogmatic philosophy that failed to ask the important question of how thinking could be applied to being.

To bridge this gap, Göschel introduces the second important analogy in the work. He lifts a threefold schema of the ideal development of individual human beings from Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit and rereads it as a development of spirit in a more traditional sense (of course, Hegelian habit of using words like soul and spirit with religious connotations made this repurposing easy). The difference is that while Hegelian philosophy of subjective spirit ends merely with the human being becoming part of a society of other human beings, Göschel’s new reading turns the development to more theological fields.

Göschel notes that even before humans wondered about proving the immortality of the soul, they were immediately convinced of the fact that the soul would go on continuing its life indefinitely. This immediate certainty, as it were, forms for him in a sense fourth proof of immortality, just like similarly the existence of God has been justified by humans at large agreeing about this being immediately certain. What awakens the need to prove that this inborn conviction is certain, Göschel states, is the fact of death that appears to contradict the immediate conviction.

The first real proof, corresponding to the cosmological proof of God’s existence, Göschel says, is what he calls theoretical or metaphysical proof. In effect, this is proof familiar at least from the Wolffian tradition: the soul is simple, thus, it cannot be destroyed through division like a composite, material thing. Göschel gives this proof a new twist by relating it to the immediate phase in Hegelian philosophy of spirit, named appropriately soul.

Hegel understood by soul a human being in a state where they had not yet grasped the idea of themselves as distinct from the world around them (or to which they had regressed through suggestion or mental illness). Göschel takes the word to describe more the result of the development of Hegelian soul, namely, a distinct individual. Furthermore, he gives it a new twist by understanding the soul as an individual necessarily related to what he calls an internal body. This internal body should be simple – kind of what Leibnizian monad was supposed to be – and separable from the external body, capable of surviving without it. Thus, Göschel states, just like the cosmological proof of God’s existence deduces from the current existence of world that requires something to sustain it the existence of an entity that will sustain it, similarly theoretical or metaphysical proof of the immortality of soul deduces from the current existence of the soul as a simple monad or atom its continuing into the future.

Survival of such a soul-atom is not enough, Göschel thinks, because just like even Wolffians noted, mere continued existence of such an atom does not guarantee that our memories and thoughts continue to exist in separation from the body. Even worse, there’s the possibility envisioned even by Leibniz that an omnipotent God could come and annihilate even the seemingly indestructible monad, just because they wanted to. Thus, Göschel states, staying in this standpoint of abstract individuality we would be locked to a most frightful dualism, where soul would be separated from everything else, including its external body, and would live in a constant fear of the absolute other or God and in pain for being separated from them.

This awareness of oneself as distinct from everything else and awareness of something else beyond oneself marks already, Göschel states, a transition to the next phase of the journey of soul, which he calls, following Hegel, consciousness. Here Göschel and Hegel have pretty much the same understanding of the term, except while for Hegel the other of which the consciousness is aware of means the external world in general and other humans in particular, for Göschel, the important other is always God.

For Göschel, the move to consciousness is also a move from the mere existence of the soul to its essence. He appropriates a Hegelian pun that the essence (Wesen) of something refers to what has happened to this something in the past (gewesen). In the case of consciousness, this involves the soul recollecting or internalising (another Hegelian pun on the word Erinnerung) this essence, which in Göschel's opinion means the consciousness becoming aware of the determination or destiny set to it by God at the time of creation.

Göschel connects this idea of the past determination of human consciousness with an analogy with the teleological proof of God’s existence, which hinges on the notion of finding the world to be geared toward some purposes. He links this proof to what he calls the practical proof of the immortality of the human soul: in essence, this is the proof Kant used in Critique of practical reason. In other words, consciousness is determined for some infinite goal that it cannot realise in a finite time, thus, because this goal is determined by God, they must guarantee the continued existence of consciousness.

The immortality in the practical proof appears to be based on the capacity of the human consciousness to approach its destiny, which due to the finity of humans seems hopeless to achieve. Here Göschel states that God has the power to change this human condition and will do it some day for everyone, leading us to the final stage of our development or spirit. While for Hegel this stage meant simply a time when a human being does not anymore feel alienation from the world around them, for Göschel the term takes more obvious religious connotations.

In Göschel's eyes, the phase of spirit means a return to the original conviction that a human soul will continue its existence indefinitely, but now this conviction can be put in a form of proof. While the ultimate experiential realisation of this conviction must wait for the time of our death, Göschel insists, we can already state this proof that he calls logical or ontological. In effect the proof is simply a variation of the Cartesian cogito: I think of my continued existence, but while I am thinking it, I must continue to exist. Göschel’s ontological proof of immortality appears to have a clear flaw: what about the time when we are not thinking? This flaw makes it as suspect as its analogue, the more famous ontological proof of God's existence, where the inevitability of thinking the most perfect being or God as existent should make us admit their existence.

What Göschel offers as a foundation of both ontological arguments is his rather metaphysical reading of Hegelian idea of thinking forming a unity with being, thinking being in a dominant role in this relation. He describes this unity as personality, not referring to a character of a conscious being, but to the concept of personhood in trinity: God is a unity in seeming multiplicity. In effect, Göschel insists that divine thinking has the capacity to penetrate anything that seemingly differs from it, both within itself (the different persons) and without itself (the creation). This penetrating thinking is going on all the time – or more likely, it is eternal in the sense of timeless. When a human spirit truly experiences the truth of both ontological proofs, it takes part in this divine thinking.

Göschel’s reading of Hegel seems to come close to pantheism, where the human spirit is like a droplet of water assimilated in the wide ocean of divinity. Yet, Göschel rejects this outcome with the Hegelian phrase that the earlier moments of development are retained in the later stages. While with Hegel it is quite natural to read such statements as saying merely that the history of human society is always played out through individuals, Göschel endorses a stronger interpretation that every individual human soul is retained by the divine thinking – not just in the Spinozan sense that these individuals are eternally thought by God, but as full individual soul-atoms with their own consciousness.

By being in community with God, Göschel continues, the individual human souls gain the divine ability to penetrate anything. This means that even the external world is not anymore a mystery to humans, but something they can freely manipulate by their will. This final stage of the development of the human soul Göschel calls resurrection, where the soul is not anymore an atom distinct from its external body, but reconstitutes this body as being now alive in a spiritual union with the soul.

Auguste Comte: Course of positive philosophy 2 – Sound, light and electricity

With little to no explanation, Comte places acoustics as the next physical discipline after thermology. Indeed, one might even doubt if acoustics deserves a place on the list, because it seems more of an applied science, which Comte has usually excluded from his account of abstract physics. Yet, what he conceives as the topic of acoustics is not so much sound, but all vibrations. This topic has been studied positively, Comte thinks, at least as long as weight, although it is far less known. It seems that it is only the highly intricate mathematical analysis of heat by Fourier that has given reason for Comte to put thermology before acoustics.

Comte sees the importance of acoustics in that sonorous vibrations have revealed – and might be the only method to reveal – the internal molecular structure on inorganic bodies. Thus, he insists, it is through these vibrations that we know the inorganic bodies can acquire dispositions, just like living things. Acoustics is also important for physiology, Comte thinks, for the study of hearing and vocalisation, excluding what happens in nerves and brains. Yet, he emphasises, the study of these phenomena should not be left to physicists, who do not understand the peculiarities of physiology.

According to Comte acoustics is, after barology, physical science using mathematics most. It investigates, he explains, minute molecular oscillations near a state of equilibrium, where perturbation of the order is immediately followed by a return to the original state. Now, since these oscillations can be transmitted through an elastic medium, like waves on water, acoustics become an application of mechanics. Still, Comte notes, acoustics is far more difficult to study than barology, since it requires much more complicated mathematical tools: for instance, we can calculate only movement of vibrations in one dimension, but not in three dimensions. Even so, he assures the reader mathematical theory gives at least guidance for finding approximations and allows use of analogies in calculations.

Comte divides acoustics into three different topics, although he mentions also fourth, the timbre of each peculiar body, but then quickly discards it, because it is more a part of concrete physics. The first topic of acoustic proper, according to Comte, is the propagation of the sound. He notes that the velocity of the sound in air is known, but propagation in other substances or such intricate questions like the behaviour of echo have not been studied conclusively.

The second topic of acoustics would be the intensity of the sound. Yet, Comte thinks, we have not advanced much beyond what we know by common observation, the only fact he considers scientific being the effect of the density of the atmosphere on the intensity. The main reason for this poor state, according to him, is that we have not yet been able to measure this intensity.

The most satisfying part of acoustics, for Comte, are the laws regulating the musical tones. Yet, even here he sees insufficiency, since only the one-dimensional case has been studied, while the behaviour of a full three-dimensional instrument has not yet been investigated.

In an even worse condition Comte sees optics, which he regards as being plagued by the two hypotheses about the nature of light, whether it is supposed to be a material emission or a vibration. Comte thinks that both hypotheses try to reduce optics to a different science: emission theory to barology and vibration theory to acoustics. He is not enthusiastic about such an attempt to unify sciences: even physiology proves that vision is quite different from hearing and feeling weight and pressure. Since both hypotheses work as well, Comte suggests rejecting both of them and concentrating in a description of the laws governing optical phenomena.

Just like acoustics does not explain the physiological phenomena of hearing, Comte insists that optics does not explain vision. Furthemore, he thinks, optics – and indeed, no science – can explain the natural colours that different objects have: any explanation would be metaphysical and always more complicated to understand than what is to be explained. Somewhat ironically, Comte thinks it would be equally ridiculous to attempt to explain why different substances have different specific gravities of substances (periodic table had not yet been discovered).

Comte’s division of optics is quite traditional. First part should study direct light, and just like with acoustics, Comte mentions that we still have no tool for measuring the intensity of light. The second part is catoptrics that deals with reflection, while the third part, dioptrics, studies refraction, and the topic of the fourth part is diffraction. Beyond these general topics, Comte also mentions double refraction and polarisation as important particular issues.

The final physical discipline, in Comte’s opinion, is electrology. It is the most complex and thus had to be developed last, he explains, and due to this late blooming it is the least developed as science: although it has many curious facts, it still lacks laws to make the facts into a scientific system. Comte sees a clear sign of its unscientific nature in the abundance of hypotheses about various fluids that should explain electric phenomena. He thinks they are not as detrimental as in optics, since no true scientist takes them seriously and uses them as mere mnemonic devices. Still, Comte warns, they have had bad influence especially on physiology, where they have inspired such ridiculous notions as animal magnetism.

Since all bodies are not at all times electrical, the first topic investigated in electrology, Comte says, should be the investigation of methods to introduce bodies into an electric state. He also includes in this part the recognition and measurement of an electric state in a body. The second part of electrology, for Comte, is electrostatics, by which he means what he describes a state of an electric equilibrium: this part includes e.g. study of distribution of electrical state in a single body or in a set of contiguous bodies. The third part is then, naturally, electrodynamics, which studies movements generated by an electrical state, for instance, repulsions and attractions of two electrified bodies. Fourth part, finally, studies magnetism and its connection to electricity.

Auguste Comte: Course of positive philosophy 2 – Weight and heat

Comte begins his study of the concrete parts of physics from what he calls barology, that is, the study of terrestrial phenomena involving weight. He regards it as the most complete part of physics, because it is based on nothing more than observations and sound use of mathematics. Yet, he adds, barology has still been in a state of dispersed fragments, with Comte’s own account as the first attempt to unite them into a single doctrine.

Comte divides barology into two parts: static and dynamic barology. Static barology investigates the effects of weight with bodies in a state of equilibrium. In the case of solid bodies, Comte notes, this investigation began already with the discovery of the Archimedian principle.

In the case of liquids, static barology, Comte thinks, did not begin until modern times. He divides this part of barology into two studies. First of them concerns the case of a small portion of liquid within a vessel: here Comte emphasises especially Stevin’s investigation of the pressure of liquid on the vessel. The second study concerns great amounts of liquid, like oceans, where we have to take into account that the direction of gravity varies significantly from one place to another. This study, Comte thinks, is intrinsically linked with the more astronomical questions of the shape of the Earth and of the theory of tides.

Static barology of gases, Comte continues, has the added difficulty of determining the weight of the gas in case. This was first made possible, he explains, by the invention of a method for creating vacuum, which allowed measuring the difference in the weight of a container with gas and without any gas at all. This discovery made it possible to apply methods of static barology of liquids to gases.

Comte notes that an important addition to static barology would be a study of capillary phenomena, especially as they are important to explaining organic processes. Unfortunately, he laments, this part of barology is still hindered by the metaphysical notion of attraction,

Dynamic barology, Comte states, should then investigate the involvement of weight in the movement of bodies. This investigation began, in his opinion, with Galileo’s study of freely falling bodies and curves of projectiles. Comte thinks that this part of barology is still far from perfect, since the laws governing air resistance are still not determined. Even more insufficient dynamic barology becomes, when we move from solid bodies to liquids and gases.

Heat, Comte suggests, is after gravity the most universal phenomena in physics. He backs up this claim with the statement that heat affects organic and inorganic nature as much as gravity, being the foremost agent acting against the effects of gravity. While gravity affects geometry and mechanics of bodies, Comte continues, heat affects the constitution of molecules and especially living organisms. Indeed, he continues, heat is the primary method by which humans affect nature. Thus, after barology, Comte concludes, thermology is the next part of physics.

Although the investigation of heat began around the time of Galileo with the invention of the thermometer, Comte notes, it was always many steps behind barology. The greatest difference between the two disciplines, according to him, was that while barology already investigated laws of weight, thermology still concentrated on metaphysical questions like the nature of fire. Comte still sees vestiges of metaphysics especially in the so-called caloric theory of heat, which assumes the existence of a fluid causing thermal phenomena.

Comte divides his account of thermology to physical and mathematical thermology, the former of which provides the basis for the latter. He then divides physical thermology into two parts, first of which studies interaction of bodies influencing their temperature, that is, warmer body warming the cooler and the cooler body cooling the warmer. He notes that there are two different cases of this interaction, in the first of which bodies radiate their heat and thus affect one another at distance, while in the other the bodies are in contact with one another.

The other part of physical thermology, Comte says, studies reversible changes in the physical constitution of the body through heat – thus, all chemical changes and inconvertible changes, like a body losing its elasticity due to heat, are excluded from this investigation. Such changes include changes in the volume of the body and changes between solid, liquid, and gaseous states of a substance. Comte also suggests the study of evaporation and hygrometry as an appendix to this part of thermology.

Comte singles out the mathematical study of thermology, because he thinks that it holds a unique position among the physical disciplines: barology and acoustics merely apply mechanics, while optics and electrology are still mired in the metaphysics of luminous and electric fluids. Comte refers especially to Fourier’s account of heat flux, the mathematical part of which he had already applauded in the first volume. Comte notes that Fourier’s work concerns only the first part of the physical thermology, that of transmission of heat, while the account of other physical changes involving heat still await their scientifically mathematical treatment. Comte also suggests the study of the global changes of temperatures as a more practical application of Fourier’s theory.