Certainly Cartesian

James Callahan (2019)

At the risk of provoking professional theologians, I offer their task is undertaken without
it’s self-proclaimed object, God, and minus it’s conservative appeal to sacred authority,
the Bible. Theology doesn’t need God to be theo-logy in large part due to its allegiance
to certain forms of certainty – Cartesian, is the easiest and most persistent adopted in
apologetic circles (and all theology is apologetic – justifying it’s existence in the face of
obvious wrong-footedness and a defensive posture premised on the notion that it
should be able to respond in kind to detractors). Theology doesn’t need God, but it’s
consolation prize is René Descartes (if that is any consolation.)

Cartesianism, birthed in early modernism and gravely reproached by late modernism,

but greatly influential in circles near and dear to many Christians who continue to find in
it a certain kind of certainty. This is to be explained, in part, by observing how it is that
Descartes uncritically employed the Platonic-Augustinian metaphysics and
epistemology that he had inherited from late medieval Christian philosophy and
theology.1

This lends an acquiescent aura of consistency and dependability to the experience of

knowledge and reality, even while drastically reconsidering what constitutes certainty.
The pervasive, almost transcending, character of the Cartesian bequest is ironically
found in the quest to completely transcend situation.2 As William Temple said, “If I were
asked what was the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe I should be

1
On Descartes indebtedness to late medieval philosophy and theology, see William C. Placher,
The Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking about God Went Wrong (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996); on uncritical appeal to Platonic-Augustinian
metaphysics and epistemology, see Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic
Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” Monist 60 (1977): 453-472; and Jeffrey Stout, The Flight
from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1981), 25-176.
2
This is the argument of Stout, Flight from Authority.
strongly tempted to answer that it was that period of leisure when René Descartes,
having no claims to meet, remained for a whole day ‘shut up in a stove.’” 3

Yet, it is not René Descartes (1596-1650 C.E.), himself, but his passion for certainty
that continues to influence and provide a legacy for Christian certaintists (those who
would require scientific certainty for Christian faith to be Christian). We may, indeed,
dislike the manner in which Descartes demonstrated that certainty should be an
either/or matter because truth was an either/or matter, but we are pleased with the
legacy of either/or nonetheless. Descartes responded to the current literary theme of his
day that “life is a dream” with the admission that all falter, all are subject to error (fallor,
which is used of “I make a mistake” and “I am deceived”). However, this should not lead
us to relish doubt but to pursue a method of certainty in all knowledge that was akin to
the certainty of mathematics. Universal doubt is not necessarily universal but meant to
eliminate from his “mind of all opinions held merely on trust and open it to knowledge
firmly grounded in reason.”4

In his Discourse on the Method we read (Rule 1) that Descartes will admit only the
obvious: “what presents itself so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I would have no
opportunity to place it in doubt.” Belief becomes nothing but the certainty of
mathematics; something like ‘I believe that 2 and 2 are 4 and that 4 and 4 are 8.’
Descartes’ goal was for total knowledge in the sense that subjectivity was excluded - a
hunger for certainty dictating the qualities of that knowledge, and a unification of science
through mathematics. Probabilities were viewed with suspicion, propositions that left
room for doubts or involved tentativeness were unacceptable as well. Even when
challenged by a friend that his desire for a singular, perfect knowledge was akin to the
first biblical temptation to be like God, Descartes responded that the desire for
perfection “comes from the fact that God gave us a will that is limitless. And it is

3
William Temple, Nature, Man, and God (London: Macmillan, 1934), 57.
4
Michael Polyani, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (San Francisco,
CA: HarperTorchbooks, 1964), 269.
principally because of that infinite will that is in us, that one can say He created us in His
own image.”5

Once the self is detached from “personality and historical contingency” there is freedom
for objectivity as a form of spiritual freedom akin to God’s existence; and knowledge is
God-like is it is of the Truth, that is, it is objective in that it is objectively rather than
subjectively grounded. This is the Cartesian absolute conception of reality that enables
one to master one’s environment and circumstances.6 Thus, the vision that Descartes
supplies is truly a narrative of meta- knowledge, religiously justified - a limitless context
that is an “image” of God’s existence as God.

This vision flows in several directions, the most important for our purposes being toward
a conservative science of the supernatural (with the dualistic vocabulary of theism and
atheism, supernatural and natural, objective and subjective; probably Descartes’ truest
legacy). It is a didactic and moral vision for society and education and religion, with a
feigned sense of objectivity (loosely concerned with doubt as a practical but not
methodologically far-reaching criterion), but a very realistic account of certitude.7
Without God we have no certainty, no science, no morality. Or, better, we need a
centered, assured and aware ‘self’ to have such a certainty and certain God.

This certainty is not only possible but also necessary in this life, contrary to the
philosophers and theologians who advised that such certainty (the pure vision) was only
possible after death; and contrary to those who suggested the inevitability of ambiguity.
What enabled Descartes to avoid the tangled, obscure and specific questions and
claims raised within philosophy and theology was his ability to frame belief in God
generically and mathematically: it is “at least as certain that God is or exists as any
demonstrations of geometry could be,” he offered. Descartes confidently identified the

5
The representation offered here of Descartes, along with the quotes from his works, are from
Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, Descartes: His Life and Thought, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), 63, 79, and 130-131.
6
Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basis Blackwell, 1986), 23.
7
Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1976),
307-362.
self as the center of this vision, especially through the narrative of his own self. As one
observed: “Descartes made it possible to attain universality, but conditionally on remaining
psychological and individual.”8

The interrelated ‘self,’ ‘God,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘certainty’ adequately depict the Cartesian legacy.
So, Taylor offers: “Descartes, like his theological precursor, Luther, suffered nearly
pathological doubt. Descartes’s entire philosophical enterprise can be understood as an
effort to overcome the insecurity brought by uncertainty and to reach the security promised
by certainty. Suspecting that the hand that inflicts the world holds the cure, Descartes
radicalized doubt. He doubted everything until he discovered that which is unconditioanally
indubitable - the cognito.

Then, in a move destined to change the face of the earth, Descartes identified truth with
certainty. Truth, in other words, is pro nobis.”9 When self- awareness (the turn to the
subject) is realized all else becomes object, including God (and systematic forms of
theology exemplify this subject-object relationship).10 When the postmodern death of self
is said to complete the modern death of God, this deals a mortal blow to the efforts of
modern theology. And Christian reactions find themselves defending belief in knowability
as realism, certainty as truth - that is, belief in the self. Theology’s creed is: ‘We believe . . .

8
Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 249.
9
Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), 22. He continues with a quote from Heidegger: “[this form of truth] expresses the fact that
truth concerns consciousness as a knowledge, a representation which is grounded in
consciousness in such a way that only knowledge is valid as knowledge which at the same time
knows itself and what it knows as such, and is certain of itself in this knowledge. Certainty here
is not to be taken only as an addition to knowledge in the sense that it accomplishes the
appropriation and the possession of knowledge. Rather, certainty is the authoritative mode of
knowledge that is ‘truth,’ as the consciousness of itself, of what is known. The mere having of
something in consciousness is, in contrast, either no longer knowledge or not yet knowledge.”
From Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row,
1973), 20.
10
Taylor offers the following quote: “When everything exists only as reflected in the ego, then
man has drunk up the sea. If man is defined as subject, everything else turns into object. This
includes God, who now becomes merely the highest object of man’s knowledge. God, once the
creative sun, the power establishing the horizon where heaven and earth come together,
becomes an object of thought like any other. When man drinks up the sea, he also drinks up
God, the creator of the sea. In this way man is the murderer of God.” J. Hillis Miller, Poets of
Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 3.
in the human capacity to know with certainty, moralize with definitiveness, and transcend
with rationality and objectivity.’ But as Hauerwas coyly notes: “Christians do not believe in
the ‘human,’ we believe in God.”11 Those of Christian faith need to discover a way to bury
Descartes, rather than trying to resuscitate the self-God, subject-object of modern
theology.

That is, if the vision of modernism should die it would certainly entail the demise of
Descartes himself; the funeral is for René! But some will say, Who weeps for
Descartes? The rationale goes something like this: we are neither modern, nor
postmodern, we are Christian. His name is generally absent from theology texts, and his
influence - “Descartes the Father” - has seemingly been displaced.12 But like Descartes
who failed to subject his conception of knowledge through absolute certainty and
objectifiability to the same methodological doubt that characterized his renunciation of
uncertainties, fallor, modern Christians decline the challenges of postmodernism’s
skepticism toward objectivity, and assertions of factuality, historicity and totalizing
knowledge otherwise known as metanarrative. What Descartes did, in Colin Brown’s
summary, was to “doubt everything that he could legitimately doubt,” but by this means
asserted “that there were a number of things that could not be doubted.” Including “the
fact of the existence of the doubter”; as well as “another indubitable fact . . . the
existence of a perfect and veracious God.” Descartes celebrated certainty, justified
epistemologically, employed in universal categories. Thus, “What is clear is that the
questions that Descartes touched on were questions which set the agenda not only for
continental rationalism and British empiricism but for Western philosophy in general
down to the present day.”13 We still live in Descartes’ era of influence.

Philosophically, the Cartesian legacy is another way of talking about foundational

indubitables that are the basis of rational practices and education, morality and justice.

11
Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville, TN:
Abingdon Press, 1998), 192.
12
Stout, Flight from Authority, 66.
13
Colin Brown, Christianity and Western Thought: A History of Philosophers, Ideas and
Movements (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 184.
And to question foundationalism is tantamount to questioning the realistic accounts of
truth/God in the Platonic-Augustinian tradition. For example, the God of Descartes was
not only the Christian God, he was particularly the Christian God characterized by
veracity - veracity and intelligence. He affirmed the existence of God (Rule 12 “I am,
thus God is”) - a God who is “pure intelligence” and calls upon us to “know” as God
knows truth.

The conclusion of Descartes carried-on the Augustinian fallacy (others say, tradition)
that to know the truth is to know God. However, this legacy also carried-on the implicit
denial of a problematic Augustinian misnomer: “between Augustine’s account of human
fallenness and his confident Platonic rationalism.”14 What the Cartesian legacy offers is
an inversion of knowledge and faith - truly carrying-on the Augustinian influence of this
two-fold characterization of human awareness, but effectively severing the
demonstrable (knowledge) from opinion (faith). Augustine had set out to demonstrate
the guidance of belief in knowing: nisi credideritis, non intelligitis. The modern legacy
treated belief as “personal acceptance which falls short of empirical and rational
demonstrability.”15

To accept the demise of Descartes’ legacy, as some forms of postmodernism insist,

may lead us in two positive directions. First is the admission of the genuinely human. In
contrast to Descartes’ unlimited and encompassing notion of the self, we may confess
that we not only experience the fallenness of sin but also, simply, the humanity of
human life (it is not a sin, after all, to be human). Solving the problem of sin will not
remove the constraints of being human, thus the questions of knowledge and

14
Stout, Flight from Authority, 40.
15
Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 266. He continues: “The mutual position of the two
Augustinian levels is inverted. If divine revelation continues to be venerated, its functions—like
those of the Kings and Lords in England—are gradually reduced to that of being honoured on
ceremonial occasions. All real power goes to the nominally Lower House of objectively
demonstrable assertions. Here lies the break by which the critical mind repudiated one of its two
cognitive faculties and tried completely to rely on the remainder. Belief was so thoroughly
discredited that, apart from special privileged opportunities, such as may be still granted to the
holding and profession of religious beliefs, modern man lost his capacity to accept any explicit
statement as his own belief. All belief was reduced to the status of subjectivity: to that of an
imperfection by which knowledge fell short of universality.”
confidence are not conquered but reidentified in light of Christian salvation (we are
saved as humans, from sin, that is). A renewed interest in sin and depravity may then
accompany postmodern critiques of modernism’s excessive confidence and ameliorism.

Second, our rational practices are impure, descriptive, and ad hoc - as much because
we are human as it is because we admit that we are not God. Affirming the first leads
some to suggest that knowledge is not only fragile but also limited, regional, and
fragmentary (i.e. human, by definition). The question becomes how to admit as much
and yet not practice a cynical skepticism. Affirming the second seems to lead us toward
infinite regress or circularity. The question becomes how we can say anything and
affirm truth. The answer to both questions is that such things are possible, but possible
as a practiced possibility found by admitting the genuine challenges of postmodernism
regarding the vision and legacy of Descartes. In this sense, postmodern critique of the
Cartesian legacy represents a renewed effort to examine and subject to critical scrutiny
the lingering assumptions of objectivity and certainty, meaning and history,
epistemology and the self.

The way forward? We may offer (tentatively) a way to abide with such circumstances in
Polanyi’s postcritical critique is a constructive effort to address a re-evaluation of the
relationship of knowledge and faith in our current circumstances: “We must now
recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual
passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded
community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on
which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can
operate outside such a fiduciary framework.” A postcritical appreciation of nisi
credideritis, non intelligitis may sound nostalgic to some; indeed Polanyi admits this
sounds like “an invitation to dogmatism.”16 But Polanyi what is after is a restoration “to
us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs.” His offering is
less traditional dogmatism and more a reticent admission of the entirely human effort

16
Ibid., 268. The term ‘postcritical’ will be further explained in the corresponding chapter
below. Polanyi’s use of the term from the early 1960s still holds true.
involved in both knowing and believing: “We should be able to profess now knowingly
and openly those beliefs which could be tacitly taken for granted in the days before
modern philosophic criticism reached its present incisiveness. Such powers may appear
dangerous. But a dogmatic orthodoxy can be kept in check both internally and
externally, while a creed inverted into a science is both blind and deceptive.” We should
be able to, but do we have the conceptual and critical skills to keep dogmatism in check
and resist a Cartesian description of creed? Not without removing the controlling
influence of modern metanarrative which has turned creed into a science. So ends
Polanyi’s chapter, ‘The Logic of Affirmation,’ so begins our venture into postcritical
characterizations of critique and Christian belief - faith without theology.