Rational justification, our ultimate mortification. Unamuno, Life 4.18
Why
did the Catholic church try to justify religion with reason? Because
that is something our life demands. We want reasons that explain and
justify life. But the truth is that life comes prior to reason, and
resists submitting absolutely or essentially to any explanation or
justification. Tragedy.
Y
¿por qué fué esto? Porque la fe, esto es: la vida, no se sentía
ya segura de sí misma. No le bastaba ni el tradicionalismo ni el
positivismo teológico de Duns Escoto; quería racionalizarse. Y
buscó a poner su fundamento, no ya contra la razón, que es donde
está, sino sobre la razón, es decir, en la razón misma. La
posición nominalista o positivista o voluntarista de Escoto, la de
que la ley y la verdad dependen, más bien que de la esencia, de la
libre e inescudriñable voluntad de Dios, acentuando la
irracionalidad suprema de la religión, ponía a ésta en peligro
entre los más de los creyentes dotados de razón adulta y no
carboneros. De aquí el triunfo del racionalismo teológico tomista.
Y ya no basta creer en la existencia de Dios, sino que cae anatema
sobre quien, aun creyendo en ella, no cree que esa su existencia sea
por razones demostrable o que hasta hoy nadie con ellas la ha
demostrado irrefutablemente. Aunque aquí acaso quepa decir lo de
Pohle: «Si la salvación eterna dependiera de los axiomas
matemáticos, habría que contar con que la más odiosa sofistería
humana habríase vuelto ya contra su validez universal con la misma
fuerza con que ahora contra Dios, el alma y Cristo»
(«Christliche Katholische Dogmatik»,
en la Systematische
christliche Religion, Berlín, 1909).
Why
did the church invent the impossible burden of natural theology?
Because that is what faith demanded. The life of the church
did not feel sure of herself anymore. Tradition was not enough for
her. Neither was the theological positivism of Duns Scotus (†).
She wanted to rationalize herself. And so she sought to lay her
foundation not against
reason, which is where it originally lay, but upon
reason—within
the narrow grounds
that reason grasps. Scotus' position was that law and truth lack
basis in any essence or substance, that they rest fundamentally on
the free and ineffable will of God. By putting the supreme
irrationality of religion forward in this provocative fashion, he
endangered the faith of those believers most blessed with mature
powers of reasoning. They responded by mounting a defense that
culminated in the triumph of Thomist rational theology. Now it is no
longer enough to believe in the existence of God. You
must also curse the believer who fails to concede that God's
existence can be rationally demonstrated, or raises doubts that such
demonstration has been made in any but the most conclusive terms.
Pohle (‡)
provides what may be the best response: "If eternal salvation
should turn out to depend upon mathematical axioms, we would see
odious human sophistry assailing the universal validity of
mathematics with the same force and fury that it currently wields
against God, the soul, and Christ."
---
(†)
John Duns (c. 1265-1308 CE) became a Franciscan friar in Dumfries,
Scotland (hence the name Scotus), before traveling south to Oxford, where he studied at a
university (studium generale)
maintained by the order. He found considerable success at school, and
wound up traveling to universities in Paris and then in Cologne,
where he died and was buried in the church of the Friars Minor, in a
sarcophagus bearing the following Latin inscription:
Scotia
me genuit. Anglia me suscepit. Gallia me docuit. Colonia me tenet.
Legend
reports that he was buried while yet alive (cf. Francis Bacon,
Historia
vitae et mortis).
His beliefs are best preserved in published commentaries
on the Sentences
of
Peter the Lombard; these commentaries date from the turn of the fourteenth century
and include material from
lectures Scotus gave at Oxford.
(‡)
Joseph Pohle (1852-1922) was a Catholic priest and academic
theologian whose studies took him from Rome, to Würzburg, to Leeds,
to Washington (DC), to Fulda, to München, and finally to Breslau.
His theological outlook is broadly anti-modern, and shows some
resemblance to that of the Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535-1600).