Scope:
The modern conflict between faith and suspicion reached its culmination when, in his 1882 book, The Gay Science,philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pronounced the death of God. Nietzsche's picture of a meaningless, nihilistic cosmos offers a stark contrast to the conception of the Christian cosmos that dominated premodern religious and philosophical thought. This medieval picture is particularly clear in the work of the major Christian thinker of the period, Thomas Aquinas. This is a picture framed by the concepts of creation, sin, and salvation, a picture in which the natural and the divine are intimately interwoven such that all of nature reflects the will and purpose of God.
Outline
I. Friedrich Nietzsche's famous pronouncement of the death of God in his 1882 book, The Gay Science, provides a stark picture of a universe without God and meaning that helps illuminate, by contrast, the cosmos of premodern Christianity.
A. For Nietzsche, with God's death comes a loss of orientation — the "horizon" has been "wiped away" and the earth "unchained" from the Sun: We are "straying as though through an infinite nothing."
B. If we consider the term cosmos to mean "the universe considered as a harmonious and orderly system," then we can say that for Nietzsche, the death of God means the end of a sense of cosmos.
C. We are left with a sense of "chaos," in a state of "nihilism," a condition in which we realize that there is no ultimate order or meaning and, thus, no way to determine what is right or wrong, valuable or worthless.
II. This vision of a universe without God and without meaning contrasts starkly with the way Christian theologians of the Middle Ages viewed the cosmos.
A. We will examine this medieval worldview as it is expressed in the work of the 13'"-century thinker Thomas Aquinas.
B. Aquinas was a scholastic theologian.
1. Scholasticism arose because of the growing recognition among Christian thinkers that well-established authorities in the tradition often appeared not to agree among themselves on important matters and often appeared not to agree with the Bible.
2. Scholastics tried to show through theological examination of these authorities and the Bible that despite appearances, they substantially cohered with each other.
3. Aquinas was writing at a time when Christian thinkers were first being exposed to the pagan philosophy of the great philosopher of ancient Greece, Aristotle.
4. Aristotle's view of the rational, fulfilled human life challenged Christian thought with a coherent and attractive vision of human life and ethics articulated without any reference to God or Christ.
5. This left Aquinas to think carefully about the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, nature and grace.
III. Aquinas's view of the relation of nature and grace is closely related to another distinction that was important for Aquinas and that many of us are familiar with: that between the natural and the supernatural.
A. But Aquinas means something by this distinction that is quite different from the way that most of us use it today.
1. It is less absolute: For Aquinas, God, through his creative power or creative grace, always already infuses human nature and the natural world.
2. This difference can be elucidated by considering some basic Christian categories: creation, sin, and salvation.
B. With respect to creation, the basic Christian claim is that God created everything that is and pronounced it good.
1. Human beings were created in the image of God.
2. Aquinas argued that the proper end, or telos, of human beings was to be united with and seek completion in God.
3. Aristotle, by contrast, argued that our telos was simply a virtuous life, and Nietzsche claimed that after the death of God, we had no telos.
4. Creation for Aquinas was not a one-time act but is ongoing, as God sustains the world at each moment.
C. We are, however, sinful, fallen creatures.
1. Despite God's creative grace, we have separated ourselves from and continue to resist God.
2. With Paul and Augustine, Aquinas sees this sin as affecting the will such that even if we know, to some degree, what our proper end is, we cannot, on our own, achieve it.
D. Through the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ and Christ' s death and Resurrection, we are saved and are able to move toward our union with God.
1. With the Reformation, a debate will arise surrounding the question of whether sin so corrupts us that, without faith in Christ, we have any sense of God at all.
2. For Aquinas, though, the fact of sin did not totally extinguish the presence of grace in our lives.
3. Even as sinners, we have a natural desire for God, a sense for our proper telos, an openness to God made possible by God's grace.
4. For Aquinas, then, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural is not nearly as strong as it is for most of us moderns.
E. The Christian cosmos of Aquinas is one in which nature cannot be understood in its full reality, in its full purpose, apart from God and God's grace.
1. Nature is not complete without grace, and all of nature reflects the grace and will of God.
2. In the periods between the 13'" and 17' centuries — the centuries of the Renaissance, Reformation, and religious wars — a new cosmos emerges to dominate Western thought, one in which God becomes much more radically separated from nature.
Suggested Reading:
Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica. Dupre, Passage to Modernity. Nietzsche,The Gay Science.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the primary characteristics of scholastic theology?
2. What is the role of the concept of grace in relation to the basic Christian categories of creation, sin, and salvation?
Lecture Two — Transcript
From Suspicion to the Premodern Cosmos
In our first lecture, I defined some of the terms — such as modernity, philosophy, and theology — at the heart of this lecture series, and I sketched briefly an outline for the lectures. I noted that our early lectures will be focused on debates about the rationality of religion, and that later lectures, once we get to the middle of the 19'" century, will introduce some new issues — in particular, the radical faith of a thinker like Kierkegaard and the suspicion of religion we find in
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
To begin this lecture, I want to say a few more words about this suspicion, and then I' ll take us back in time to the premodern period — to begin considering some of the historical and conceptual background we need in order to begin the discussion of religion and modernity. As I' ve said, in the middle of the 19'" century, a new way of thinking about — and criticizing — religion emerges in the work of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. These are thinkers that the contemporary philosopher Paul Ricoeur refers to as the "masters of suspicion" — for unlike the thinkers of the 17'h and 18 centuries, they are not primarily interested in whether it is rational or not to believe in God. They didn't think it is, but this wasn't their primary concern. They were interested in what such beliefs mean — that is, they are interested in what lies underneath religious ideas and practices.
For Marx, for example, religion hides things about human reality that we refuse to recognize or admit. It produces in believers what he calls "false-consciousness" — that is, illusions and self-deceptions grounded in cultural and social relationships.
Consider this well-known quote from Marx: "Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
So for Marx, religion does involve suffering — say the suffering that comes from knowing that we are sinners, the anguished conscience of the penitent. But Marx distinguishes this religious suffering from real suffering because he believes that religious suffering masks real suffering and its sources. We' ve been led to believe that there is such a thing as sin, and we do suffer with this belief — but for Marx, the idea of sin is a mask that hides what is really going on in our lives and prevents us from addressing it.
For him, of course, we suffer because we exist in an unjust society where social and economic structures alienate us from our humanity. So long as we are focusing on our sin and our hopes for salvation, we will not see this injustice and alienation — and then, of course, we can't do anything about it. Religion, in other words, acts as a kind of drug and prevents us from seeing what is really going on and gives us a false sense of comfort and hope.
In this sense, suspicion is a mode of interpreting religion that identifies and examines the psychological and social conditions that underlie our religious beliefs and practices, and we' ll explore this suspicion in more detail in later lectures. The question of suspicion can also help us think about at least one of the historical trajectories we' ll be tracing in these lectures. Where a thinker such as Marx criticized religion from the perspective of a utopian social project that saw modernity, and in this, Marx was like many religious thinkers of his time, seeing modernity as a historical era in which human beings would come to a full realization of their human nature. Marx didn't think we could do it through religion as many religious thinkers did, obviously, but he had this utopian social project in the background. A thinker like Nietzsche, by contrast, had a much more pessimistic view of things.
In 1882, Nietzsche wrote a book entitled The Gay Science, and about halfway through the book, he made the pronouncement for which he is perhaps best known: "God," Nietzsche wrote, "is dead." A few pages later, he addresses the significance of this event with a story about a madman. Let me quote some of the crucial sentences from
this passage:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" — As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter ... The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. 8'e have killed him —you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving ... [b]ackward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still
any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing ... God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
There is a lot to notice about this passage, and a lot that would complicate our understanding of what exactly Nietzsche means when he says that, "God is dead." For instance, he puts the words into the mouth of a madman, not speaking in his own voice. He's also saying that God hasn't just died, but that we have murdered him. Notice, too, that he is speaking not to those who believe in God, but to those who do not believe in God. The madman seems to think that these unbelievers do not really grasp what their unbelief means.
I' ll talk about some of these issues in later lectures, but here I just want to focus on Nietzsche's view of one of the consequences of the death of God. Here we have an event that for Nietzsche, or at least for the madman, entails not just the death of God — but the loss of meaning. In other words, according to Nietzsche, we have done much more than just murder God — as if that weren't enough — but we have wiped away the entire horizon, and we have unchained the earth &om its sun. This means, according to Nietzsche, that we do not know where we are going because horizons and suns, if you think about it, are means by which we orient ourselves in space — by which we get a sense of direction, and so know where we are going. For Nietzsche, this sense of disorientation leads him to ask whether we are not in fact "straying as through an infinite nothing." So, in short, for Nietzsche, the death of God is the death of the sense of the universe as a meaningful whole.
After the death of God, we are left with what Nietzsche will call in other passages "chaos" — the opposite of the order that pervades the sense of cosmos shared by premodern Western intellectuals, and that I will discuss in just a minute. Nietzsche represents just one view of what is entailed by modernity — though it's an important and influential one — for many modern thinkers, even those who deny the existence of God, will claim that the universe does remain ordered, even harmonious, bound together perhaps by natural laws. But part of what Nietzsche is getting at here is the idea that even if we continue to believe that there is some order to the universe, once God dies this is an order that can tell us nothing about ourselves and about how we should live. It doesn't place us or orient us — if anything it alienates us. As I understand it, when Nietzsche says that we have unchained the earth from its sun, he is saying that we are on our own, that from the perspective of the universe — of all that goes on beyond this little planet and its little people — we are insignificant.
Let's go back in time — leave the 19'" century and Nietzsche and go back in time a bit. To this point, I have talked a lot about the idea of "modernity. Of course, when we use a term such as "modern" we have to keep in mind that there are never absolute disjunctions between different historical periods. Historical periods are human constructions — one way that we organize and, indeed, simplify the incredible complexity of human history.
For this reason, there is never really a clear point at which one period ends and another period begins. Since, historical periods are so closely intertwined with one another, to understand one, to understand modernity for example, it is necessary to get some sense of what preceded it — to understand, in our case, how certain ideas, social changes, and other factors in the premodern period paved the way or helped establish the context for the emergence of modernity. So, my goal for the rest of this lecture and the next one will be to
establish some of this historical context.
At this point, then, I want to turn to what I will call the "premodern cosmos of Christendom" — the medieval Christian world-view that dominated Western thought in the centuries leading up to the modern period. In particular, I want to explore the fundamental Christian categories of Creation, Fall, and Salvation as they are inflected in discussions of the relation between nature and grace in the work of the great medieval Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas. Then, in the next lecture, we' ll look at the challenges to Aquinas's world-view that emerged in the 14 through 16 centuries, as Europe moves toward modernity with the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.
Before going further, though, I should define the word "cosmos" since it plays an important role in the next few lectures. Cosmos is defined in my Webster's Dictionary as "the universe considered as a harmonious and orderly system." So to talk about a cosmos, it is not enough to just talk about the universe or about the whole of reality, but it is to conceive of this whole as a harmonious and orderly system — which suggests, of course, that it is also possible to think about the whole of reality, of all that is or the universe, such that it is not harmonious or not ordered. This, I think, is what Nietzsche's madman is saying: With the death of God comes the death of the cosmos — of a sense of a meaningful whole that makes it clear to us where human beings belong and what they should do.
But let's now consider the premodern — more specifically, the medieval cosmos, where we see something very different. When I talk about the medieval period, I am talking about a period that extends roughly from the fall of the Roman Empire, around the beginning of the 5'" century C.E., to the Protestant Reformation at the beginning of the 16rn century. In the early part of this period, we see the gradual split between Orthodox Christianity and Catholic Christianity. Orthodox Christianity was centered in Constantinople, now Istanbul, in the eastern part of what had been the Roman Empire.
Roman Catholicism, of course, was centered in Rome — in the western part of the empire. Our story focuses on Catholicism because it plays the major intellectual, cultural, political, and institutional role in the slow emergence of Europe as a center of world civilization during the Middle Ages. For the first part of this period, Europe was a backwater dwarfed in its political power and intellectual and technological achievements by the Islamic world. But by the time we get to the period from about 1100 to 1300, this is beginning to change, and this is the period of interest to us now.
Thomas Aquinas was born to a noble family between 1224 and 1226 in southern Italy. He was educated in monastery schools from a young age — largely under the influence of the Dominicans, one of the major monastic orders of the Catholic Church. When he was 16,
Aquinas decided to join the Dominicans and become a monk himself, and this was a decision that apparently upset his family quite a lot because, as the story goes anyway, they responded to his decision by holding him hostage for a year, trying to change his mind. It was only when the pope interceded and persuaded them that this was important that they relented and let the young Aquinas follow his call. He then pursued an academic career as a Dominican — teaching in Paris, Rome, and Naples until his death in 1274. Aquinas's career was so illustrious and his influence so great that even though shortly after his death there was controversy about whether some of his teachings were heretical, he was canonized as a saint in 1323. His reputation grew over the centuries to the point where in an Encyclical published in 1879, Pope Leo XIII described him as the definitive source of Catholic Doctrine and, in the following year, the pope made Aquinas the patron of all Catholic educational institutions. We will see in later lectures that Aquinas's influence was the cause of much debate among Catholic theologians in the 20'" century.
I need to talk for just a moment about how Aquinas did theology, before going into more detail about specific ideas. Aquinas practiced a method of theology known as "scholasticism," which was the dominant form of theology during the High Middle Ages. Essentially, scholasticism arose because of the growing recognition among Christian thinkers that well-established authorities in the Christian tradition often appeared not to agree among themselves on important matters and often appeared not to agree with the Bible. Unlike Protestantism, as we shall see shortly, Catholicism is based on the claim that the traditions and creeds, the official statements of belief, of the early Church are just as authoritative as the Bible indeed, that the Bible can't be properly understood without the guidance of these traditions. The scholastics, then, tried to show through theological examination of the Bible and of these early authorities that, despite appearances, they did substantially cohere with each other.
It's also important to note that the question of authority for Aquinas was complicated by the fact that he was writing at a time when Christian thinkers were first being exposed to the writings of the philosopher Aristotle. With Plato, Aristotle was one of the two great philosophers of ancient Greece — writing more than 1,500 years before Aquinas. But although Plato's writings and influence had played a huge role in Catholic thought through the centuries, the work of Aristotle — though known by reputation — had been largely lost to the Latin-speaking Catholic tradition. These writings, however, had been preserved and translated into Arabic by Muslim
thinkers, and in the century preceding Aquinas, interactions between Catholics and Muslims, particularly in Spain, had exposed Aristotle to the West.
As a pagan philosopher, Aristotle did not, of course, possess the authority of the Bible or of the early Church Fathers. such as Origen or Augustine, but he did possess authority — and so his view of a human life that could be fulfilled by the achievement of rationality and virtue alone, without any reference to God, presented a great challenge to Christian thought. Here was a coherent and attractive vision of human life and ethics articulated without any reference to God or Christ. This was a challenge, and what Aquinas did was to bring into sharp focus the difference between reason and faith — or between, on the one hand, an understanding of humanity and nature that we can grasp and understand through our senses and our rational capacities, and this is what Aristotle was talking about, and on the other hand, the understanding that is available only through God' s revelation that is found in the Bible and interpreted by the early traditions of the Church.
For Aquinas, incorporating Aristotle into Christian theology meant rethinking these relationships. This distinction between what we can know and understand through our senses and our reason, on the one hand, and that which is available to us only through revelation, on the other hand, is closely related to another distinction that was important to Aquinas: between the natural and the supernatural, or between those capacities we have as part of our human nature and those that are made available to us through God's grace.
I want to explain, however, that Aquinas means something by this distinction — particularly between the natural and the supernatural that is quite different from the way that most of us use it today. When we moderns distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, we usually are thinking about a God or a power that operates as something separate from nature, something that comes from the outside — often, for example, in the form of miracles that disrupt the natural order of things.
For Aquinas, however, this distinction between nature and supernature is more complicated than this because the distinction is less absolute. For Aquinas, God — through his creative power, or creative grace — always already infuses human nature and the natural world. So, where we, we moderns, might think of God's action as taking place in the miraculous interruption of natural causality, a theologian like Aquinas saw God's action in everything that happened — even working through our own exercise of free will.
Let me explain this in a little more depth through a quick lesson in Christian theology, focused on three central terms: Creation, Fall, and Salvation. We begin at the beginning, with Genesis, the first book of the Bible, in which we find God creating the heavens and the earth in six days. We see that as God reflects on this creation, God sees that it is good, and when God finishes his work on the sixth day, after creating human beings, God, as the Bible puts it: "saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."
As most Christian thinkers from the earliest days of the tradition, and certainly as Aquinas's time saw it, because everything was created by God, all of it — including human beings — had their proper end, their goal, or, to use the technical term, their telos, in God. For us human beings, this means that our telos is to be united with, and to seek, our completion in God — this in contrast to Aristotle's claim that the telos for human beings was the virtue that came with wisdom. Where Aristotle saw us as having this goal just of virtue of wisdom, Aquinas saw us as having our goal in God — virtue of wisdom would come with that, but it was'with God. We can also contrast this clear sense of telos in Aquinas with Nietzsche's fear that after the death of God, human life has no direction, no end — no telos.
But it is also important to point out that despite this creation story in Genesis, which ends after six days of work and then one day of rest, Aquinas believed that God's creation was not a one-time act that God then stepped back from to watch — perhaps intervening once in a while in what today we would call a miracle. Rather, God's creation is going on all the time. God is sustaining the world at each moment — is participating in his creation even as his creatures participate in him. So, another way of saying this is that God is imparting his grace at each moment. One consequence of this view is that when Aquinas uses the word "nature," he means by it nature as created by God. In other words, this is a nature infused with God' s power and God's intention — with God's creative grace.
There is, however, a problem — for in the book of Genesis, not soon after God's creation, those human beings made in God's image Adam and Eve — disobey God by eating an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil — although I read just the other day that there were no apples in the Middle East at that time, so they probably were eating an orange — but, nonetheless, they had fallen. As Christians came to interpret this transgression, it represents an "original sin" through which not only human beings but all of God' s creation fell out of the right relationship with God. So, despite God' s creative grace, despite the work God does to draw us to him, we have separated ourselves and continue to resist God.
There are many different ways Christian thinkers have understood the Fall, but let me mention two here that had a huge impact on medieval Christianity. First, we turn to Saint Paul, author of a number of the major letters, or epistles, in the New Testament. For Paul, even though those of us who put our faith in God and Jesus, even though we know the good, know that we should direct our love towards God, we have been corrupted — we are enslaved by sin, and so are unable to do what we really want and really know that we should. So, in his Letter to the Romans, perhaps the single most formative theological document in the Christian tradition, Paul writes:
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do ... For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. (Romans 7:19; 21 —23)
For Paul, then, we are divided between what he calls the "old man" and the "new man," between the law of God and the law of sin.
A second influence on medieval conceptions of the Fall, one that was itself deeply influenced by Paul, comes from Augustine — the North African bishop who wrote in the late 4'" and early 5 centuries and is generally considered to be one of if not the most influential theologians of Western Christianity — for Catholics and Protestants alike. The passage I want to read comes from Augustine' s Confessions, a powerful record of Augustine's own spiritual quest. There, Augustine confesses to God his struggles to throw off the weight of sin, to understand how he can be relieved of this burden, and he writes in Book 7 of The Confessions:
I was astonished that although I now loved you and not some phantom in your place, I did not persist in the enjoyment of my God ... I caught sight of your invisible nature, as it is known through your creatures. But I had no strength to fix my gaze upon them. In my weakness I recoiled and fell back into my old ways, carrying with me nothing but the memory of something that I loved and longed for.
As we see in these passages, sin affects in particular our wills — such that for both Paul and Augustine, we do have some sense of what is right and divine, but we cannot manage to do it with any consistency. We thus are prevented, at least in this life, from getting to our natural end — from really loving God.
The last point of this whirlwind course in basic Christian theology is the idea of salvation. In Jesus Christ, God is born into the world as a human being, then is crucified and resurrected — and in and through this life, death, and resurrection, God forges a new covenant with human beings and makes possible their salvation. God does this out of love — it is an act of divine grace.
The question for Christian thinkers and an area of debate, at least since the Protestant Reformation, is whether sin so corrupts us that without faith in Christ, without God's saving grace, we have any sense of God at all — that is, whether in the state of sin God's grace is totally absent from our lives. As we' ll see, Protestant thinkers, such as Luther and Calvin, tend to take this more pessimistic view of human nature.
Aquinas, however, saw things differently. For Aquinas, we do need to distinguish between two kinds of divine grace: the creative grace with which God creates the world, and redemptive grace — embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, through which God saves us. But Aquinas also believed that sin did not totally extinguish the presence of creative grace in the world or in our lives. This meant that we, even as sinners, remain informed by God's creative grace and have a natural desire for God, a sense for our proper telos, an openness to God's saving grace. So, for Aquinas, God's redeeming grace does not overcome or interrupt nature, but completes or perfects it, and God is supernatural not in the sense of a power utterly distinct from that of nature, but in the sense of that which encompasses nature and directs it.
One of the best contemporary commentators on Aquinas, Fergus Kerr, puts it this way: "Aquinas," he writes, "'supernaturalizes the natural': 'our mere desire to see God' is already 'a sign of the actual presence of grace within us' — not of a merely possible gift. One can specify human nature only with reference to its supernatural destiny." By contrast and for a variety of reasons — some of which we will look at in the next lecture — as we get closer to the modern period, some Christian thinkers do start talking about nature and human nature without reference to this supernatural destiny, and about the supernatural as a completely separate order from the natural.
In conclusion, then, we can say that the premodern cosmos, for Aquinas, is one in which everything, including human beings, has its proper end — its meaning or its telos — in God. This means that nothing can be fully understood without reference to its place in God's creation and God's divine plan. However, as we saw at the beginning of the lecture, with Nietzsche, by the time we get to the 19 century at least some will look at the universe and see not God' s creation, not God's plan, but only dark space with numberless stars — a confusion and profusion of things without order, harmony, or plan.
Even if we keep in mind that Nietzsche's is not the only modern vision of the cosmos, it is still the case that after Aquinas more and more are Western thinkers, Christians included, starting to look at things very differently than he did. We will begin looking at these transformations in the next lecture, the emergence of a cosmos in which distinctions between nature and grace, natural and supernatural, physical and spiritual, become more and more pronounced to the point where some, like Nietzsche, see a nature that instead of being animated by and directed towards God is a brute fact — in itself meaningless.
