Pascal vs. Descartes on The Relation between Philosophy and Science
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 เม.ย. 2023
- In this lecture series, Dr. Peter Kreeft examines key ideas in philosophy by comparing and contrasting two representative philosophers in each episode.
In lecture 7, Dr. Kreeft discusses the differences between Pascal and Descartes on just about everything-though both were believers and practicing Catholics. Pascal was a great scientist and mathematician who saw philosophy as a way of life, while Descartes tried to make philosophy like mathematics, formulating clear and distinct ideas aimed at achieving absolute certainty.
To learn more about these philosophers and the other major philosophers who helped shape the world, check out Dr. Kreeft's book series, "Socrates' Children: An Introduction to Philosophy from the 100 Greatest Philosophers": books.wordonfire.org/socrates...
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Dr. Kreeft is fantastic. He spoke at our Jesuit high school here in New Orleans just a few weeks ago.
I can't thank word on fire and Dr. kreeft enough for this series!!! Absolutely fantastic!
Wow WoF actually listened to us viewers and ease off on the background music. I really hope all Dr. Peter's lecturers are now followed the same.
Thank you WoF and blessings to Dr. Kreeft too.
WoF is so classy
@@gethimrock indeed
As someone who grew up on a crazy pentecostal cultish environment, it is always refreshing to hear Christian ideas explained on such reasonable, eloquent and peaceful manner.
I have always been a fan of Descartes & Pascal; but after this lecture I definitely lean towards Pascal much more #genius
Amazing lecture series, I’m hoping for more of these enlightening videos . Thank you 😊
same here! bible is my philosophical framework.
Major props for listening to commenters and toning back the background sounds.
Please organize these into a playlist, or even their own page on TH-cam. They're very good.
it is
Fascinating. Thank you, Dr. Kreeft and Word on Fire ✝️
This is an outstanding lecture. I’m so grateful for your posting this and the series generally.
The end gave me chills 🙏🏽
This makes me want to read Pascal again ❤
What an intellect, thank you and God Bless. I pray for the the wisdom and grace to put this into practice in my own life in such a way that it will some influence on those around me
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:21 🤔 Pascal and Descartes contrast in their approach to philosophy, with Descartes emphasizing rationalism and Pascal focusing on a way of life.
02:54 🎲 Pascal's famous "wager" argues that believing in God is the most reasonable choice for happiness, whether or not God's existence can be proven.
04:05 🕊️ Pascal and Descartes differ in their views on faith and reason; Pascal seeks a personal faith tied to the heart, while Descartes aims for rational certainty.
06:26 📚 Pascal's "Pensées" are notes for a book that challenge traditional philosophical works and advocate a more experiential and personal approach to philosophy.
10:41 💔 Descartes and Pascal contrast in their philosophy's purpose: Descartes seeks to transform the world through science, while Pascal aims for God's conquest of humanity.
14:25 🧠 Pascal emphasizes the heart's role in knowing and intuition, contrasting Descartes' focus on rational thought and mathematical certainty.
16:43 🔑 Pascal's method is inductive and practical, based on personal experience, while Descartes' method is deductive and theoretical, centered around rational doubt.
19:16 ❤️ Pascal's philosophy centers on the heart as the core of human existence, contrasting Descartes' emphasis on the separation of body and mind.
22:04 💭 Descartes' and Pascal's metaphysical premises are similar, both being supernaturalists, but they differ in their focus on the Supernatural and the Natural.
23:00 🌄 Pascal's metaphysics places more emphasis on the practical impact of God on human life, while Descartes uses God as a bridge in his theoretical system.
24:09 🌟 Pascal's emphasis on faith, hope, and charity produces a distinct metaphysical level centered on Divine love, differentiating him from Descartes.
25:20 🔥 Pascal sees God as a burning fire of love, in contrast to Descartes' view of God primarily as a rational and intellectual entity.
25:46 🏛️ Descartes lacks a comprehensive ethics, focusing on science and technology, while Pascal incorporates faith, hope, and charity into his ethical framework.
26:28 🏛️ Descartes' scientific method aims to end disagreements in philosophy, including politics.
27:08 🛏️ Descartes' philosophy stems from a mystical dream after experiencing the trauma of the 30 Years War, hoping for peace.
27:35 📚 Pascal, an empirical observer, contrasts Descartes' idealism, emphasizing the gap between human thought and natural moral law.
28:04 🌍 Pascal presents human unhappiness without God and the happiness found in a relationship with God in his work "Pensees."
28:32 🏛️ Pascal sees politics as a problem, while Descartes views it as a solution to human issues.
29:02 🌍 Pascal emphasizes sin and evil's empirical evidence, while Descartes only mentions it in the context of scientific discoveries.
29:41 📜 Descartes ties sin to his ambition to master nature and enhance human life through scientific progress.
30:09 ⚗️ Descartes suggests using scientific knowledge for human health and advancement, which echoes his method's practical focus.
31:01 ⚖️ The idea of conquering death and achieving artificial immortality aligns with Descartes' vision of human progress.
31:56 ⚰️ The pursuit of conquering death challenges the divine order, echoing themes from literature like Frankenstein.
33:02 💣 The consequences of technological advancements, like nuclear bombs, highlight the dark side of human progress.
33:16 ☠️ The Pandora's Box of pride and greed for power, once opened, may lead to unforeseen and irreversible consequences, challenging Pascal's optimism.
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Really love listening to Dr. Peter Kreef..
Masterful insights and rhetorically mesmerizing. Thank you, Dr. Kreeft!
Absolutely fascinating lecture for multiple reasons that I won't belabor here. One wishes that Dr. Kreeft's lectures were in book form, to be read & reread. Sometimes even watching on TH-cam xx's, is not easily done in the course of other life requirements.
Excited for this installment! Pensees is fantastic.
Thanks for posting these videos, they are really well put together and fascinating.
Praise the Lord
Thank you for sharing your joyful, measured and indepth understanding of these fascinating concepts
Thank you. Priceless are your lectures.
Always awesome - Thanks Peter.
Interesting and you could include the Cartesian Plane as an invention of Descartes. Descartes seems to be a disembodied mind - a holdover of Socrates' disposition - but is still credited as the first modern philosopher with his radical doubt. I favor Descartes with the title rather than Machiavelli. I wouldn't say that Pascal represents philosophy as your title suggest but maybe seen as the forerunner to existential philosophy. Both men had incredibly different dispositions and supposedly the French don't notice the difference (according to Allan Bloom).
Very helpful.
Very interesting until the very end
Thank you your a Christian treasure for the philosophically inclined
Thank you for a great lecture.
I think it's more fitting to put Pascal in the same school Don Livingston puts Hume in; the Latin Rhetorical tradition which believes reason is inseparable from tradition and rhetoric. Truth is not a matter of correspondence with a single fact but an account of the whole, and both philosophy and eloquence aim to comprehend the whole of the topic at hand. This includes Cicero, the Italian Renaissance Humanists, Catholic Michel de Montaigne (who immensely influenced Pascal), and the great Neapolitan Catholic philosopher and rhetorician Giambattista Vico.
The school is apart from the rationalist, empiricist, and idealist schools of thought.
Amen, amen video:
nulla invidia sicut christiana caritas.
I'd never know that one can deprave a woman of a right to defend her health AND accuse her of a soulless murder at the same time! Briliant indeed...
Word.
What is meant by"Even God is not self-caused but uncaused"? I would be greatful for any clue!
Descartes is at the origin of the current relativism and gnoseological and moral subjectivism, as it relativizes all knowledge and action to the Ego or to the subject. Every true and every good are true, and it is good because I think it and I believe that it is true and that it is good. What others think or do is worth it if I think it and I do it.
Cartesian thinking is actually thinking without an object. The Cartesian is not interested in reality, but in himself and his ideas.
With all this, Descartes, as we know, was a great mathematician and a great physicist, but only because of these levels of knowledge he accepted realism. Where he put work his idealism was metaphysics, anthropology, morality, and theology.
In metaphysics, he reduced being to the self and the real to the real thought.
In anthropology, he has reduced man to the thinking spirit at the head of a thought body. But if the body is a thought body, then the thought is a body. And if a man is a thinker and the thinker is the thought and the thought is a body, then the man or the thinking is a body. Matter and spirit, initially opposed, eventually coincide, just as thought coincides with being, which is also a material being. Thus, Descartes is at the origin of both idealist and materialistic anthropology.
In morality, everything is decided by the "I" because everything revolves around the "I". Absolute self-centeredness.
In theology, if God is an innate idea, then he does not come out of the horizon of the self. So God is me.
So, Cartesian anthropology continues to be the undisputed presupposition for that part of modern culture that intends to affirm spiritualism and that for three centuries has resulted in Kantian idealism to reach pantheism with Hegel, in 800.
No one today accepts more the soul-body dualism of Descartes. Man is seen as the only subject, and there is a tendency to deny the distinction between soul and body. Descartes' theoretical instance has been replaced by a practical instance of a dialectical type: the opposition of interior-man versus exterior-man in Luther, the opposition of worker-master in Marx, the opposition between the useful-useless for the empiricists.
The Cartesian tendency is in competition with other anthropologies of pragmatic orientation, such as the English empiricist, the Masonic, the Protestant and the Marxist. Only Descartes poses the theoretical problem of human nature by looking at the spirit-body relationship. The others all have a practical orientation: economic profit for the empiricists, personal salvation for Luther, Promethean man in Marx. But all are centered on the self in the likeness of Descartes. God is an idea in Descartes.
Descartes was the first philosopher who had the audacity to base reality not on God, but on himself, that is, on self-consciousness, considering one's own self in such a way that it could be deduced from it in the first place, as Kant did, that knowledge does not derive from things, but from self-consciousness ("I think").
Subsequently, Fichte deduced that the self-conscious Ego as a thinker, places itself in the Ego as reality, so it was no longer necessary to admit a reality external to the Ego (the "thing in itself"). After Fichte, Hegel would complete the identification of being with thought initiated by Fichte: "the real is the rational and the rational is the real", with the identification of metaphysics with logic.
Descartes is not the founder of modern philosophy, but the misfortune of modern philosophy, the initiator of a false philosophizing that produced in the nineteenth century Marxist atheism and Hegelian pantheism, which was followed by Sartrian existentialist nihilism. He is the root cause, not of the achievements, but of the failures of modern philosophy. Many times he has been refuted by the Thomists. Descartes' works were placed on the Index by the Church in 1663.
The true and sound modern philosophy is the one that has refuted the imposture of Descartes, restoring the biblical gnoseological realism of the "Ipsum Esse subsistens". The refutation has persisted over the centuries, until today, given the obstinacy of Descartes' defenders. A continuous work of restoring realism is needed to remedy the resurgent failures of idealism and pantheism, today condemned by Pope Francis under the names of "Gnosticism" and "Pelagianism". (excerpts from Fr.G.Cavalcoli OP)
In what way is Hegel a pantheist?
@@bmc8871 Pan-theos: everything is God or God is everything. So everything is God. Not that God does not contain all perfections; but there is the idea of an identification of God with the world and with man and vice versa. If God is everything, there is only God; there is no world outside God, but the world is God or part of God.
So we have the world and man in God's place. This is what the Bible calls idolatry. Pantheism is accompanied by atheism as two sides of the same coin: if man is God (pantheism), then God is not the creator of man (atheism). Man places himself in being; the ego is self-position or, as idealists say, it is "self-consciousness." The "I", Fichte will say, poses itself. He does not need a God to create him, because he exists by himself. The idea that man exists by himself by virtue of his self-consciousness is found in both pantheism and atheism.
Pantheism is the soul of German idealism.
The pantheist's requirement that everything be led to the one, the awareness of the power of the divine that animates and pervades everything, the will to express the intimacy of God to all things, the power of spirit and thought, the supreme dignity of man, similar to God, are certainly valid instances that, however, pantheism carries on with an uncontrolled intemperance to the point of falling into the opposite vice of atheism and materialism. In fact, the world and man are God, then the greatness of God dissolves into the human, the mundane, the material. If everything is God, then the false, the evil, the defect, the ugly, the suffering, the death, the sin is divine.
Pantheism has had two fundamental forms since the most remote antiquity: there is a pantheism of being (Parmenides and Severino, a recently deceased Italian philosopher) and a pantheism of becoming (Heraclitus and Hegel). The first is eternalist and a cosmic. It absorbs the world into God; the second, on the other hand, is historicist and cosmic: it absorbs God into the world.
In Christology, we have two opposite heresies: either the disembodied and abstract Christ of the dualist and Docetism and Monophysitism of the first centuries; he is the Christ of Gnosticism; or the cosmic and evolutionary Christ as the summit of the world in Teilhard de Chardin. It could be called the Pelagian Christ. (just this morning I talked with a theologian, a friend of mine, who is oriented in this sense.)
For Karl Rahner, as for Hegel, matter enters into the very essence of God, for which the world is not a vain appearance, but theophany. And for this reason, it can be said that the world is God.
Regarding knowledge or epistemology, once the thing is conceived, even if it were God, our mind expresses it outwardly in voice or in writing by giving it a name. Thus, the concept of God corresponds to the reality of God and to this corresponds the word God. So, the concept of God is obviously not grasping God or taking possession of God as I grab a hammer to plant a nail. I intentionally, spiritually and representatively, through the analogical, transcendental and participatory notion of the entity, grasp and possess what God is or his essence, as far as I understand it, in relation to my limited capacity for understanding.
In this sense, I can say that I know the essence of God through the concept. In this sense, Hegel was right. His error was to identify human reason with divine reason, human science with divine science, whereby for Hegel man can conceive God as God conceives Himself. Closing the thing in the concept of the thing, it is clear that for Hegel there is nothing that surpasses the concept of the thing, even if it were God.
Hegelian idealism involves the deification of the human spirit. It admits the existence of God as Reason, Concept and absolute Spirit (In German Geist, spirit, is always written with a capital letter, like all nouns, and it is never clear whether we are talking about the human spirit or the divine spirit. I even suspect an evil spirit!) as absolute Idea, one, totality, infinite, eternal, simple, subsisting being, but it is also maintained that the Spirit changes, is finite, historicized, humanized, materializes, becomes nature.
@@bmc8871 (I quote another Italian Author, though not a Thomist!) Hegel understands very well the cultural, historical, spiritual, and philosophical fruitfulness of Christianity. He understands how Christianity has affected history and will always remain very sensitive to this issue. But this inheritance is the great gnosis of Hegel. On the one hand, it means recognition of the value of truth, and on the other It means that this truth is no longer current, it is relevant only on the level of philosophy and no longer of religion. With the rather paradoxical situation that in the end, for the Hegel of maturity, the philosopher conceives exactly what the believer cannot conceive appropriately. The God of the believer is not a real God, and only the philosopher understands what the true God who, precisely, is not transcendent but is immanent. If on the one hand, faith is always linked to the idea of the otherness of God, on the other hand, philosophy, for Hegel, is the system of identity and not of otherness. Otherness is to arrive at identity. For this reason, for the mature Hegel, philosophy is moment superior to religion and for this reason, we can speak of Hegelian gnosis: inheritance means the great gnosis by Hegel. This is, I think, the real challenge for Christianity from the nineteenth century onwards, as gnosis means overcoming the real dimension of Christianity. The real challenge for Christianity is not positivism, it is not materialism, but the real challenge is this, which is the thinnest and the innermost.
It is only in 1805-06 that Hegel states explicitly that Christianity is the absolute religion and states this explicitly saying that the beautiful religion, meaning the Greek religion, is beautiful but does not have the depth of Spirit. It is the first time that Hegel takes a stand against neoclassicism and the idea that the ancient world is equal to or even superior to the Christian one. And now It affirms the superiority of Christianity over the classical world: here is the turning point! Now the absolute does not appear simply as a substance, as in Spinoza, but the substance must become spirit, as the higher religion affirms.
So Hegel now comes valuing Christianity as a religion of subjectivity in the modern sense, enhancing the superiority of the modern over the ancient, the superiority of Christianity over classical religion: it is a capital breakthrough! Phenomenology presupposes this turning point. The Hegel of maturity, therefore, is reconciled with Christianity after having preferred paganism to Christianity and in the middle years had put them in some way on the same plate as the scale.
But this does not mean that Christianity is not the most perfect form, on the religious level, but is philosophically subordinate. Christianity is the perfect of religions, but philosophy is superior to religion.
And how does Hegel move from historical Christianity to overcoming Christianity?
The novelty is that Hegel now justifies the necessity of Christianity and indeed, of the revelation of Christ. It is needed to appear a man in whom the Reconciliation between human and divine had to be sensitive because the universal to be concrete must mediate with the particular. The infinite must mediate with the finite; Christianity is the mediation between the finite and the infinite; and not in the form of imagination, as for the classical gods, but in the form of historical reality. So all men must have the intuition that infinity is finite, but at this stage belongs the first form of faith, that is, external faith or sensible faith. Which is based precisely on the testimony of the senses, on what we have seen and heard. For Hegel, faith sensitivity is based on what we have seen and heard. But that faith is faith imperfect, because in reality true faith is interior faith, which is based not on what we have seen and heard, but on the internal witness of the Spirit, that is, on the idea.
So Hegel in maturity goes a step further than youth, which excluded the very idea of the mediator. Hegel in maturity states that it is important that mediation takes place in one - and not as in India where everyone is gods because there is no seriousness there, says Hegel, there is only imagination, and the divine is mixed with the human in the most arbitrary fantasy -. It must be one that historically offers itself for the deification of all humanity. But that unique mediation has value relative to the moment, that is, at the advent of the Spirit. When the spirit comes, and the spirit is maturing of the Spirit for him, and the community is formed, then the process of divinization must become universal; that is, reason must become the patrimony in some way of all and not just one. In this sense, it is gnosis, since gnosis is the passage from faith external to inner faith because inner faith is already an idealistic faith. Faith inner faith is no longer faith "in Christ", inner faith is faith in the idea, says Hegel several times: "It is only the spirit that bears witness to the spirit."
It is the key phrase of Hegel, it is the key phrase of his thought because the whole building Hegelian is based on this: "The Spirit bears witness to the Spirit." And this is not a demonstration, this is a statement, a postulate. All great Hegelian construction presupposes the truth of this; Hegel repeats it from youth to maturity: "The spirit bears witness to the spirit". So to recognize the divine that is in me, it must manifest itself, but only as an opportunity for me to rediscover the divine in me. The disciples believe in Jesus because it is divine in them that echoes the divinity of Jesus.
It is a communion between equals, not between different. This is how the "idea Dei", the immanent transcendent, works!
In Fichte, there is also one form of dialectic and also in Schelling there is another form of dialectics; but in Hegel, it is the very life of the spirit that is dialectical. Having done the coincidence of the life of the spirit with dialectics is certainly an absolutely brilliant point by Hegel. The dialectic in Hegel is not simply a method, but that is method and content at the same time. Dialectics is logic and ontology at one time, and therefore dialectics configures the concrete way in which the spirit is actuated.
The point to understand is that Hegel has a conception of the spirit of the Aristotelian type: the spirit is a power that must be actualized. The "idea Dei" is its power, in the Aristotelian sense: it must manifest, determine and actuate. The manner of determination is not arbitrary but it is necessary, according to the immanent logic of the concept. This is the heart of the thought of Hegel: dialectics as the life of the spirit, that is, as a process of determined actuation, concrete and necessary of the spirit, according to stages that must necessarily be retraced in a certain order. This allows you to write the "Encyclopedia of Sciences" philosophy". In that work, the path of freedom coincides with that of necessity because development is necessary. So the reason is actualized and becomes autonomous, that is, free, according to Hegel through a process that is immanent and necessary; In this way, he thinks of saving the Spinozian lesson: the moment of necessity coincides with the moment of freedom, that is, of the autonomy of reason itself.
The Hegelian reason is conceived truly as a universal reason; It is the greatest system of philosophy that has ever been conceived after Aristotle, concerning which, in the history of philosophy, there is no other such a vast vision; it is an "Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences" - meaning the totality of the human knowledge. Who would be able to make such a synthesis today? None, at the moment. So the point is that Hegel, to total this process of reason, must sacrifice, must jump, must censor, must above all reduce reality to the idea; so reality must enter into the idea, but reality enters into the idea in the form of universality, so that all that is individual - once it has offered its mediation to the universal - must sacrifice itself in the process of the whole. The individual - the which is more important to us, after Kierkegaard, who made it so well understood to us - all this for Hegel, as for all modern rationalism, is simply empirical psychology. That is, on this point, he remains Kantian.
The Ego in the individual sense is simply the Ego colorful, psychological, and empirical, and therefore Hegel fails to have the concept of the person as an ontological reality, in which the greatness of reality. So his philosophy, as a good pantheist, is a refined pantheism superior to Spinoza's pantheism, because Hegel's is a pantheism that seeks to mediate with Christian theism. Hegel, from 1805-1806, understands that theism cannot be liquidated, because through theism passes the principle of subjectivity which is to the center of modernity, and modernity means freedom; and freedom means the recognition of the principle of subjectivity. But this principle of subjectivity is always understood in a transcendental way, it is never the subjectivity of individuals people and when Hegel speaks of the person in the Philosophy of Law the person is simply a legal concept, and indeed it is the most abstract of concepts: to say that one is a person is the most abstract thing because it is like saying that he is nothing, that is, that he does possess nothing. If I say of someone that he is a person, it means that he is simply a person, while what counts much more is what one possesses, his property. These are the concrete determinations or the fact that you are a teacher, a businessman, or a lawyer: this is what makes you concrete.
Ok
@@PaoloGasparini-ux2kp Very good. I have heard this before of Hegal; that the Hegalian dialectic is a type process-theology, or has a gnostic understanding of God which requires a participation in history in order for salvation (or absolute pure Spirit) to be realized. In short, it could be said its cosmology is Monist and immanent in Being, in that it situates God within creation as opposed to Dualist and transcendent, and posits God outside of creation and thus creating the World ex nihilo.
I just don't know how much Hegal was knowingly articulating conceptions of God that were unorthodox or if in his effort to defend German nationalism and the Christian West he posited conceptions of God that would lead to Pantheism? Obviously his true legacy is with his student Karl Marx who, although thought of as a materialist, can now be understood better as a kabbalist and faithful descendent to his long rabbinical lineage.
KIERKEGAARD VS. NIETZSCHE PLEASE 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
❤❤❤❤
Commenting so more people watch
Look at the renaissance painting of Plato pointing upwards and walking side by side with Socrates pointing downward in the hall of Parthenon in Ancient Greece. Plato believes that the reality on this world and universe is upabove in the realms of the Heavens and the Gods but for Socrates the reality is down on this very earth we are thriving and walking. These arguments is settled in the 12th century by St Thomas Aquainas one the father and scholar of the Catholic Church in his book The Summa Theologica! K
I think the other man was Aristotle
In his ultimate conclusion he said « If that happens Pascal will prove that he had been much too naive and optimistic » but did not he meant Descartes instead ?
Seems to be an tongue error in my understanding.
Thanks to answer me.
I think Dr.Kreeft meant if the transhumanists are correct and are able to create an immortality in this fallen state we are in. It may be that they lock themselves out of Heaven by closing the door that is death. Essentially very much a Hell on Earth as salvation can not occur then for them.
IMHO though, it seems impossible even in princple that they can do so, even if they can extend life unimaginably long, physical reality just seems made to bring ending.
Point is that Pascal is in general a pessimist about life on Earth, but even his pessimistic imagination and expectation would get outstripped by the ensuing debauchery.
The Cartesian-Pascalian knot (heart and reason) is fundamental for understanding the horizon of modern philosophy. In the following reflections, I rely on an Italian scholar, a profound connoisseur of modernity. We will start with the cultural context, the usual framework with which historiography and manuals present these two protagonists.
1) The "secular" reconstruction of modern thought. For Descartes, the picture is clear: he is the beginning of modern thought. The question is whether he should be interpreted as the beginning of modern secular thought, of modern rationalism, according to the prevailing opinion. This is an opinion that has been consolidated not only recently but originates from the historiography of the 19th century. It is consecrated by the idealistic model of the history of modern philosophy, from Hegel to Giovanni Gentile, and is also accepted by Marxist historiography of the last century and then by secular, positivist, liberal historiography. Thought, the "ego cogito," is the beginning of everything, and from this comes a rigorous, scientific method, an analytical-synthetic method, "photocopied" onto that of mathematical analysis. Therefore, studying reality with this method would be, in the technoscientific vision, the way to arrive at the truth.
In the face of Descartes, the forerunner of modern rationalism, Pascal appears as the "anti-Cartesian" according to the prevalent image in philosophy manuals. Pascal is the author of the heart, "le coeur," against reason; the author of Christianity and faith against rationalism.
Taking into account a couple of fragments from the "Pensées" that target Descartes, the image of Pascal as "anti-Cartesian" is solidified.
In this antithesis, Descartes is the beginning of the modern strand, while Pascal is the erratic block of a Christian thought at sunset, a final convulsion of Christian thought. According to common opinion, Pascal is a scientist, a great scientist, a genius who died too soon, whose "Pensées," a splendid, unfinished work with an incomparable style that has influenced French language education, allow him to be considered a great philosopher for the depth of his anthropological reflections.
In essence, Pascal would be somewhat like Kierkegaard: both fundamental expressions of modern thought, both unclassifiable, both anomalies.
Kierkegaard is a bit less anomalous; at least he is the "anti-Hegel," and his main works have a more determined philosophical framework. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard cannot be categorized within a strand; if anything, he must be seen as the initiator of existentialist thought.
But in the 19th century, according to school manuals, other authors have a genealogy; they connect within strands, currents of thought, while Kierkegaard remains isolated. In the current manualistic view, it is a thought that opposes German rationalism between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.
Essentially, it can be affirmed that the "secular" reconstruction of modern thought does not allow placing Pascal in a stream of thought due to a distorted interpretative model. In fact, it is not possible to assert that an author is isolated. Not even Jesus Christ is isolated as he is the fulfillment of the Old Testament!
We all have a history, and we all position ourselves within a story and a tradition. Since the secular reconstruction of modern thought does not allow placing Pascal in a stream of thought, it already indicates a deficiency.
Pascal is an antimodern author, and therefore one might wonder if he is the "anti-Cartesian."
This is how he appears in the just-described framework. If Pascal is the "anti-Cartesian," he would be an antimodern. However, anyone who reads the "Pensées" gets the impression of a very modern author, even more modern than Descartes, closer to our sensibility than Descartes himself. We can have students read Pascal, and they feel him very close.
With more difficulty, they feel close to Descartes.
(However, Descartes encountered great success, even in philosophy, because he adopted an ordinary language, very understandable, abandoning the abstractions of scholasticism and obscure terms).
And yet, Pascal appears to us much more modern, a sort of modern Augustine. This can also be explained very easily: Pascal is an existential author, one of the fathers of modern existentialism, as Dr. Kreeft says (1:47).
It's not just Kierkegaard. A reading that values the first part of the "Pensées," the one about man, has been done in the manuals that have been influential in Italy, while it almost entirely neglects the second part, that is, the transition to God, the theological part, which is abandoned. Pascal never entered into philosophical problematic in Italy.
Contrary to France, which continues to produce studies on Pascal, in Italy, reflection has not considered Pascal except with a few studies.
2) Common Traits of Pascal and Descartes: the Break with the Middle Ages, with St. Thomas.
Reflecting on the two philosophers, Pascal and Descartes, we can ask if they are both modern and to what extent. There is a common model that unites, in difference, both Descartes and Pascal: that of modern Augustinianism. Pascal is not the only one to be Augustinian. Augustine is his reference author, also through Port-Royal. Giansenio's Augustinus was the cornerstone text of the Jansenists, and it is known that Pascal frequented the Jansenists and the solitaries of Port-Royal. But Descartes also has a typical Augustinian inflection in the same process from cogito to the first certainty, God. In these pages, he closely recalls Augustine's writings against the academics or the skeptics. That path of interiority that arrives at God as the foundation of every other possible certainty is a typically Augustinian process.
But what does modern Augustinianism mean? Modern Augustinianism is a reading of Augustine that opposes Thomas. At this level, the break with the Middle Ages occurs because the Middle Ages never opposed Augustine to Thomas. In Thomas's works, Augustine, along with Dionysius the Areopagite, is the most cited author. On many decisive issues, Thomas does nothing but repeat Augustine; he is in continuous dialogue with Augustine. For Thomas, Augustine is a supreme authority, a Master, an essential reference point.
It is only modern Augustinianism that opposes the Augustinian school to the Thomistic one and distinguishes and opposes them. Modern Augustinianism takes a typically introspective path, completely abandoning the moment of externality, i.e., abandoning the world. Considering that the entire Thomistic approach instead starts from the "a posteriori," from the world, from the impact with external reality, to then reach God.
Thomas greatly values the -analytic - Aristotelian principle of causality, which properly corresponds to the path of resolution or judgment. In this path, speculative reason discusses, travels from the complex to the simple, that is, it breaks down the complex into the simple to reach the understanding of a given thing. It is the deconstructive phase, or destruens.
For example, it can be seen in the steps taken in the logical study of a notion, where one goes from the individual to the species and from the species to the genus, up to the transcendental in the order of their sequence. A path of resolution is followed: from the complex to the simple, from the particular to the more universal (John Doe - man - animal - living - being).
Even when moving from knowledge of the properties of a thing to the essence of the same thing - which is its causal reason - one proceeds in a resolute manner (for example, from freedom or the capacity for science, we move to rationality).
Above all, when we demonstrate the existence of God starting from the world, ascending from the effect to its cause, we proceed analytically or by resolution. Saint Thomas is the proponent of this method par excellence. Well, the entire Aristotelian-Thomistic analytical procedure is now abandoned.
Modern Augustinianism is pietistic, tendentially idealistic: everything is between the soul and God or between the cogito and God. The mediation of the world is purely incidental; it is not decisive.
This transition is very relevant: starting from the assumption that the Christianity to which both schools refer is essentially historical, that the relationship with God passes through historical mediation on the plane of Revelation, as well as cosmological on the plane of creation, well, this denotes that we are facing a significant rupture: modern Augustinianism risks losing a part of reality.
Just as modern Thomism, on the other hand, risked turning into a positivistic naturalism, as will happen in the course of the 19th century.
3) Consequences of the Abandonment of Saint Thomas.
The Thomistic proofs of the existence of God are therefore abandoned, both in Descartes and in Pascal. The proofs for the existence of God found in the "Summa Theologica" are linked to the physical presence of the world, to a teleological view of the world, that is, goal-oriented: everything in the world refers to a ultimate cause, to an end.
This teleological view of nature is abandoned because the mechanistic view of the cosmos imposes itself. Behind the weight of the new sciences, of physics, the Aristotelian view of the world is dismissed following the refutation of the Ptolemaic hypothesis.
The mechanistic view of the world is shared by both Pascal and Descartes.
While the teleological view of the world allows for the support of "a posteriori" proofs of the existence of God, a mechanistic position could at most provide the hypothesis of a watchmaker god, the god of the Enlightenment, which certainly is no longer the creator God of traditional theology.
Both Pascal and Descartes are mechanists: in Descartes' "Treatise on the World," the world is the great machine. On the other hand, Pascal continuously speaks, repeatedly, of "homme-machine," man-machine. For Pascal, too, the human body is a machine, a conception that makes the idea of the organism that belonged to Aristotle and was taken up by Thomas disappear. The organism consists of parts aimed at the totality, at unity. In the human body, everything is teleologically oriented according to a plan.
(Contemporary biology, through the idea of DNA, somehow recovers the teleological project against the mechanistic-materialistic approach that dominated until the end of the 19th century. It may be worth mentioning a similar recovery that is taking place in the post-modern or hypermodern era, as someone calls it, precisely concerning the "analogy." The analogy saw its greatest development and use with Thomas Aquinas, but with his contemporaries, it already experienced the premises of its future crisis. In fact, starting from the 13th century, the two great schools of philosophical-theological thought based in Paris, where Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200-1280) and then his disciple Thomas operated, and in Oxford, where we see among others Roger Bacon (1214-1292) and Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), later John Duns Scotus (1275-1308) and William of Ockham (1280-1349), are in confrontation and effectively follow different paths without understanding each other. The Aristotelian line, followed by Albert and Thomas, will gain great importance, especially for Catholic theology, and three centuries later, it will be officially accepted, in good part, by the Church in the Council of Trent (1545-1563), while the Platonic line, prevalent in Oxford, will focus, starting from Roger Bacon, on the problem of the mathematization of the sciences, creating the remote methodological premises for the development of modern science. Thus began the gradual distancing of scientific thought, increasingly univocal - as mathematized - from metaphysical and theological thought, analogical. Scotus will resolve the analogy of being into a multiplicity of univocal terms, just as Ockham will dissolve the reality of the universal into a pure name (nominalism), denying it a real existence outside the mind. This operation will then, with the success of Galilean and Newtonian science, have a repercussion on philosophical thought, through Descartes (1596-1650) first and Kant (1724-1804) later, until the dissolution of the possibility of a metaphysics as a science and consequently of a theology as a systematic science.)
Modern science, following the Galilean method, is a science that is as mathematized as possible, where each symbol must correspond, within the same demonstration, unequivocally to a single definition. However, in recent decades, research on "complexity" in various fields of science seems to show the intrinsic limits of unequivocality and to reintroduce an analogical-finalistic approach, that is, Aristotelian-Thomistic!
The body cannot be explained mechanistically. This is the attempt that many will make in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the idea of robotics in the eighteenth century will lead to the construction of real automatons to create a being with human characteristics, but a being constituted by a mere juxtaposition of parts, so that the teleological idea as such disappears. Modern thought, until Kant and beyond (transhumanism, AI, NBIC: Pill, artificial procreation, gender studies), is ultimately mechanistic, gnostic, and animalistic (evolutionary).
Dominance over nature goes hand in hand with the legacy of educated magical thinking (Florentine humanism of the late Middle Ages) and the soul/body dualism (progressive emphasis on the dignity of the will and Manichaean reduction of the body to impure, insignificant matter).
The mechanistic idea will then be partially challenged by Kant with the Critique of Judgment and then by romanticism, which somehow recovers the idea of the purpose of nature and not by chance rediscovers Aristotle (with Leibniz).
The "a posteriori" proofs (from effect to cause or analytical, ascending, Aristotelian-Thomistic method) therefore lose value, but in Pascal, this loss of value also depends on sin, in the sense that Pascal does not deny that there can be proofs starting from the world. However, the world now, after the sin of man, is no longer the visible manifestation of God.
So in Pascal, there is one more reason compared to Descartes, in the sense that Pascal is convinced that now the human mind is no longer capable of discerning the signs of God in creation, as Jansenism - in its pessimism - borders on Lutheranism.
Regarding creation, Pascal speaks of a hidden God, "le Dieu caché," because after sin, nature only reveals a hidden God. Compared to Thomas, who is convinced that nature clearly refers to the Creator God, a greater pessimism emerges in Pascal, typical of the entire seventeenth century. On the other hand, this is the century of religious wars in Europe, a tragic age, the Elizabethan age of English tragic theater, of the French theater, from Racine to Corneille...
There is talk of a hidden God, and consequently, the relationship with God has to do with interiority, not with the external world. On this point, Descartes and Pascal agree, it is modern Augustinianism.
Therefore, the idea of the frontal opposition between Descartes and Pascal appears unlikely; instead, many interesting analogies emerge between them.
Modern Augustinianism in France will find its emblematic expression in the work of a very important author who is now no longer studied, Nicolas Malebranche. Hume's position is not understood without Malebranche, just as Leibniz is not understood without Malebranche, and modern ontologism, therefore Rosmini, is not understood without Malebranche.
Malebranche is a key figure in modern thought. In Italy, there are about ten studies in fifty years on this thinker.
In modern Augustinianism, a dualism is created, which is not only between soul and cosmos but also between spiritual life and history. As the philosopher Augusto Del Noce (+1989) states, modern Augustinianism not only loses external nature but also loses history, in the sense that history is no longer imbued, "shaped" by the Christian ideal or an ethical ideal, as it could be for example in Dante Alighieri. Dante's "De Monarchia" still reveals this view of history, ordered according to a principle of unity of peoples. Machiavellianism now triumphs: the external world is governed by the harsh law of force. For this reason, it is necessary to hope that the orders remain unchanged and are not upset by revolts and revolutions: a conservative loyalty, generally of a monarchical type, which does not nourish any illusions even about monarchies, in the sense that even the monarch is a man who has nothing sacred. The figure of the emperor or sacred king that characterized the Middle Ages has been completely lost, with the perfect awareness of a realpolitik for which every power is based on oppression, every power is arbitrary, that is, it has no rational foundation but simply manifests itself with an initial act of force. Trying to discover the origin of power can be dangerous because it raises in the people vain ambitions for changes or healing of the social body. Better to keep everything as it is (status quo) for people's tranquility and so that there are no massacres, wars, internal struggles.
Pascal's vision is therefore somewhat close to that of Hobbes, there is no great difference on the political level. But on the other hand, even Descartes in the Discourse on Method, where he speaks of provisional morality, states that until the method has led to the elaboration of a more secure morality, it is preferable to maintain the existing one according to the customs of the people. This position would be defined as conservative today. The problem is that the wars of religion have created chaos and terror, precluding trust in the possibility of improving the disrupted world.
This dualism between soul and cosmos, between soul and history, between spiritual life and history is the common structure of both Descartes and Pascal. It is the Cartesian dualism between the "Treatise on the World" and the "Meditations on Metaphysics." For the former, the world is a great machine without God, while the "Meditations" address the issue of the soul in relation to God. Similarly in Pascal: in nature, there is the hidden God, but not so in the life of man who is forced to always choose for or against God, and the same applies to social life, which, abandoned to Machiavelli on the political level, is instead preserved according to charity on a personal level. Well, this dualism is "the structure," as asserted by a French scholar from the 1960s, Goldmann, with a Marxist background and orientation. Goldmann is a structuralist and argues that there is a common thought structure in these authors, and it is a dualistic structure between tragic thought and dialectical thought. Dialectical thought would be capable of reconstituting syntheses, but here, we are dealing with radical dualisms. One could conclude, following Goldmann, that Christian thought in the seventeenth century focuses on the self and abandons the world, causing a rupture with the Middle Ages. And then, it also abandons history.
(One will need to reach modern Christian thought - with Rosmini and Maritain - to have a reflection capable of finding a bridge with history again.) This void will then be filled by secular and Enlightenment thought, in the sense that the Enlightenment will return to offer, in a secular vision, the relationship between reason and history, contributing to the birth of the philosophy of history in the modern era. So, the void left by Christian thought will be filled by the Enlightenment through the idea of "progress" that makes a teleological view of history conceivable and therefore allows the overcoming, or at least the downsizing, of Machiavelli.
Returning to the seventeenth century, the analogies between Descartes and Pascal show how limiting the model of the Pascal anti-Cartesian is. Not only do the two thinkers operate within a common structure, but it is precisely the traditionally crucial point of opposition that does not hold: that of the rationalist Descartes against the Christian Pascal. The secular view of the history of modern thought is essentially based on the fact that Descartes is a rationalist while Pascal is Christian. The idea that makes Descartes the beginning of modern rationalism is thus the pivot of the secular view of the history of modern thought, a view that is widespread, almost entirely hegemonic, not only until the fifties-sixties-seventies but still shared today by educated people, both secular and especially Catholic.
Even the historiography of neoscholasticism, i.e., the authors of the Thomistic school who have engaged in this field since the thirties-forties, confirms the same view, only the judgment changes. For some, it is obviously positive, for others negative: for secular people, modern rationalism begins, and for others, modern atheism originates. In the Middle Ages, of course, there was a perfect synthesis between reason and faith, afterwards, opposition occurred, and thus modern thought would be entirely anti-Christian. It is necessary to observe that most authors of modern thought were Christians and believed in God. This position has contradictory and problematic aspects.
As for Pascal's opposition to Descartes, it is based on a couple of fragments from the "Pensées." One is fragment 194 of the Chevalier edition, where Pascal states: "I cannot forgive Descartes; he would have liked throughout his philosophy to be able to do without God, but he could not help making Him give a tap to set the world in motion, after which he does not know what to do with Him." A very famous fragment that has become the linchpin for the anti-Cartesian Pascal, but this criticism is misleading if not understood well. Pascal is not less of a mechanist than Descartes, as he also excludes the study of final causes in nature. Like Descartes, like Spinoza: the mechanicism is the same for everyone. When it is said that the great merit of Spinoza is that he excluded final causes from the study of nature, well, in Descartes' "Treatise on the World," here too final causes are not traceable. It is known, however, that Pascal also states other things, but in the mechanistic conception, final causes cannot appear, otherwise, it would not be mechanicism. However, this does not concern Descartes' alleged atheism: we cannot use that fragment to claim that, according to Pascal, Descartes was an atheist. Pascal never intended to level an accusation of atheism against Descartes. Descartes is not an atheist, and his God, as Gilson says in his last work "The Difficult Atheism," a beautiful posthumous work, is the God of his wet nurse. Descartes did not invent God but received Him from tradition, which was the Christian tradition of his parents, of his wet nurse. Descartes' God is omnipotent, good, true, creator; in short, it is the Christian God. Obviously, He has all those characteristics typical of Christian theology of God. He is not the god of the Enlightenment; He is not the clockmaker god, not the supreme architect of the universe; He is precisely the God of Christian theology.
4) The Birth of Atheism.
How, then, can one accuse Descartes of being atheist or of being the beginning of modern atheism? This is the approach, for example, of a groundbreaking study with exceptional theoretical density: "Introduction to Modern Atheism," whose author, Cornelio Fabro, asserts that modern atheism begins with Descartes because Descartes' belief would be entirely secondary to the dissolving power of his philosophical principle: the cogito. In other words, in him, atheism is already potential, requiring only time to develop; his being Christian would be absolutely inconsequential compared to his philosophy.
This approach is not entirely wrong; it captures a part of the truth but cannot be absolutized. In Descartes, final causes excluded from physics return in metaphysics. This is why the "Meditations on Metaphysics" lead from the ego cogito to God and from God to the world. Briefly retracing the process, one can note its close resemblance to the Augustinian refutation of skepticism, which returned in France during the wars of religion in the form of Epicurean and libertine atheism.
Philosophical problems cannot be set in an abstract manner, however. Descartes started with doubt because doubt was a historical and cultural problem at that moment. Philosophies must be situated historically.
Atheism as a product of the wars of religion, that is, as a reaction to political theology.
The methodical doubt is, according to some, an expression of the crisis produced by the wars of religion. Montaigne expresses this widespread skepticism very well. The "Essays" are the expression of this skepticism, which became harsh and radical in the libertines, the first modern atheists. It is essential to emphasize that atheism, as a cultural phenomenon, originated in France in the mid-sixteenth century through erudite libertinism. They are essentially Epicureans, inspired by empiricism, sensationalism, and naturalism of the Epicurean position but simultaneously revive the writings of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, which are translated again into French. This revival of skepticism brings the question of doubt back to the forefront. This is the context in which atheism then arises because the Middle Ages did not know the atheist, and antiquity did not know atheism. Atheism is a purely modern phenomenon in which the cogito does not fit but the wars of religion do. This is a fundamental point because one cannot continue to repeat the idea that the Middle Ages centers on God while the modern era centers on Man. It is not possible to think of a simple spiritual shift, but one must take into account the immense crisis of the seventeenth century and the fracture of Christian Europe.
The wars of religion are an enormous scandal: Christians against Christians. Modern Enlightenment arises from this circumstance: if faith divides, reason unites; if religious denominations fight, only the State unites, and it is the so-called "Modern State," without ethical interferences. Modernity is the product of a crisis and the attempt at a very partial, and even mistaken, solution to the crisis, which nevertheless contains true insights: religion, for example, cannot claim to totalize the entire public sphere. A distinction must be made between God and Caesar, which was still the ancient distinction of the first centuries of the Christian era. Therefore, one must critically deal with modernity but at the same time distinguish the positive from the negative. One must avoid the dogmatic opposition between a wholly good Middle Ages and an entirely bad Modernity or vice versa.
Returning to the question of doubt in Descartes, it is essential to emphasize that it is methodical doubt. Descartes' hypothesis is to reverse skeptical doubt into a doubt that leads to certainty, to dialectically overturn it. But this was already the strategy that Augustine had used against the academics, i.e., the ancient skeptics. It starts from illusory perceptions, dreams, confusion between dream and wakefulness. The problem is the distinction between representations of reality and those of dreams. In short, doubt about everything involves the field of knowledge of the world. But doubt is doubting, doubting is thinking, hence the famous expression cogito ergo sum. Doubt cannot eliminate the fact of doubt; it is itself an act of thought. So, at the very moment when one puts everything into crisis, one asserts a fundamental certainty, that is, doubting, therefore thinking. Cogito ergo sum is actually a cogito-sum. But even before him, Schelling had said it better than him.
Actually, it is not the outcome of a syllogism or a demonstration; it is immediate evidence: when thought thinks, it attests to its existence. But the "sum" concerns the cogito, not the world; hence the problem of ideas that come from the world. Could these ideas be produced by the evil genius? This hypothesis of the evil genius is truly stratospheric; it is like a Gnostic hypothesis of a perverse god. Compared to the evil genius, Descartes' attempt to get out of it is truly problematic because the evil genius could even distort the intellect. Not surprisingly, this hypothesis also returns in Nietzsche in some way, i.e., in radical deconstruction, in modern irrationalism. So, it is an extreme hypothesis that Descartes certainly introduces to radicalize his doubt even more, but it can be difficult to get out of it after admitting it. On the other hand, there would be no need to introduce this hypothesis. It is the same artifice posed by Schopenhauer: the world is my representation; it is no longer anything real. Here emerges the Schopenhauer-Nietzsche trend and what is called Descartes' rationalism fails to exorcise irrationalism, despite many attempts: "The world as my representation." "The world as a fable," Nietzsche will say. To overcome doubt, it is necessary to verify if there are in the individual ideas that do not arise from the experience of the world or from their own imagination. This is the famous discourse on adventitious or fictitious ideas.
Innate ideas remain, i.e., something not produced by the individual or coming from the world but present as constitutive. Descartes resorts to the idea of the infinite, a dazzling idea: the individual has within himself the idea of the infinite, but since he is structurally finite, this idea cannot be produced by him; it is given to him by something else, i.e., by an external cause, through a causal relationship. And this can only be a being that is truly infinite.
Both are the relationships between science and philosophy. Both are mathematicians and philosophers. Both are great stylists when it comes to how they write. But Blaise Pascal seemed to be the one who clearly distinguished between human science and divine science. He said,'We do not increase a continuous magnitude of a certain order, when we add to it, in such number as we want, magnitude of a different order'. What he meant is that if science refers to reason, rationality. Human rationality alone is powerful to fathom the divine science. Descartes at his side has considered that with science, knowledge humans can make themselves as the owners and masters of the universe. Blaise Pascal has constantly reminded the existence of God. He said, 'Let man, having come to himself, consider what he is at the cost of what is'.
.#ForTheAlgorythems
❤ This is exactly why Pascal was right and not Decartes. Pascal understood what Jesus said: it is all about LOVE. Decartes did not....it was all about himself and his science. Purgatory fire prepares souls for the paradise, it all makes sense what Pascal said :)
It is a grand tragedy when siblings fight. Why do we pit these two who were born together, grew up together, sought and wept and journeyed together as though they were enemies all along? What sense is there in tearing out chapters of the book of our nature and pitting them against one another as though one could speak against and not into the other. The Accuser and Shatterer, the Murderer from the Beginning, is the author of this division.
From one who attempted, we can not make our own world with our minds, we borrow everything from God and can not make life, but lifeless puppets in our imaginations. Reason can not be self-establishing, because it is not alone or meant to be complete in itself and self-sufficiency. This leads to solipsism and eternal isolation with or without nihilism. This from one who asked to see, is at least a part of Hell I believe; becoming alone eternally even among others. There is nothing worse I have experienced than that impenetrable wall of abandoned loneliness. It is not solitude I speak of, that you do by choice and have communion still with God or meaning. This dark isolation I am speaking of is a dark spiritual solitary confinement without truth or love beyond oneself. There is no pit as deep and dark as a soul caved in upon itself. Nothing worse than a child who lives alone and decides it can be nothing but abandoned and no home is possible or desireable. Don`t let anyone think they are an orphan at the core of who they are. We have a Father Who is Love and so infinitely loves us, and sent His only Son, that we may have life to the fullest. Trust Him and seek Him, and make the rough journey home here below, and live in His Divine Love forevermore.
To tear measurement from meaning is to render the former blind and the latter mute. If reason were sufficient for us it would be alone able to intuit God and know Him as the angels do and have no need of time or space. Were reason utterly derelict, it would not be made after the image and likeness of the Word of God and would not be the rider controlling the chariot of the passions. A chariot and rider need the road to travel and a road without a rider, becomes wilderness. We were born into an environment, embodied and with immortal rational souls that reach towards God, remove either, and you have done death`s work even in the land of the living. Without humanity, the physical Universe knows nothing. We must have things beyond us and a hand to stretch ever to seek them and the mind to know them. For we seek their Infinite and Eternal Author of both hand and what is reached for, of both mind and its measures and what it beholds and recieves.
Reason is a steward and chief among servants, but not a master of its own realm, but the humble servant of the King. It does well for itself and its charges when it knows how very high and yet how very low it is. For the Truth will set us free. All is gift, neither reason nor nature is King and Ground of our being, all whisper the Name of the King of Kings for those who listen.
The world is wonderful but broken, we are broken images and need the Model and Artist to draw us aright. The story has gone awry, we need the Author to write it back into its vision. The program has become corrupted, we need the Developer to repair the scrambled code. The building`s foundation is crooked, we need the Architect of Life to fix the design we the workers broke. We are children who ran away from home and refused to listen. We need our Father in Heaven. Let us then prodigal sons and daughters all return to Him, the Only Begotten and True Son of God has come to gather us made in His image, the image of the Image of God, back to Himself.
The King has come among us and seeks to make us princes and princesses, heirs to His Kingdom in His Father`s house. The offer is more than we can desire Nd what that which whispers of Him, merely are types of. Let us go to the Kingdom of God and let death die and its sin be brought to its own death by dying to it. Let go of the shadows, and enter the Light of Lights. Trust Him.
I must say, to know God truly as He is, we must belong to Him and with Him commune and and in Him abide, and in and through Him, with one another. To know in the current common sense, is only to begin to know by knowing of God. Love is the end, knowledge merely a handmaid, if taken alone as an end doubling back on itself, we get to where we are in the world now. Worshipping the idol of reason,one of a pair of siblings: the least of all things worthy of being considered as God alongside the human heart (its sister) as its own end. Indeed, Love, Light, and Life all are titles of the Lord.
I don't think they are being presented as enemies. Friends can still disagree about crucial things though - look at Chesterton and Shaw, for example. Just because they walk together and eat and drink together doesn't mean one isn't more righteous and truthful that the other - look at Christ and the apostles before the Resurrection for an extreme example.
@@petardraganov3716 @petardraganov3716 That may have validity to it. Though there is a clear preferred option.
Eitherway though I was more directly speaking to reason and faith, body and mind, measurement and meaning, the analytical and telos and mind and heart.
I am saying these, over the men giving them a face, that we pit together and truly are one. I say the pitting against one another is an artifical one. We rescript IMHO siblings as dueling rivals. Not just here but embedded in our cultural millieu.
I do know DesCartes made am idol of his whereas Pascal did not. Clearly here Pascal has won. But in the wider sphere many do overly lionize the heart just as much as they do the mind. Both are humsn so together an end not a means, but neither can be the final or prime good. They are both subject to one another and to God together as a soul, a person.
@@petardraganov3716I am railing against the Enlightenment and the Romantics, not Dr.Kreeft.
That's not quite right, is it ? To become a true Christian means there are many things in this life that people find enjoyable that you will have to sacrifice or forgo. So, to say, you lose nothing is not true. The real question is whether you win more than you lose either way. An eternity of peace and happiness as a possible outcome might sound great to some, but human nature would have to be radically different than it now is on this planet for most people to actually enjoy eternal peace. No, the real people you meet on this planet enjoy some amount of conflict, drama, and, dare I say, even violence, as forms of entertainment. This might be sad, but it is nonetheless TRUE !
First, peace is a byproduct of conflict. But the greatest conflict in history, the conflict between man and God has been brought to an extraordinary resolution in Jesus Christ - the son of God died for our sins. We don't enjoy peace for the sake of peace, we enjoy peace because we come to realise the value of the sacrifice made for us. Peace is reconciliation. And Christianity is not for 'most people' - Unfortunately 'most people' are on the way to perdition. Unless they know and assume what Christ has done and that would revolutionise their whole being. Second, if 'most people' find something enjoyable it doesn't mean that is enjoyable for all people, if you 'taste and see that the Lord is good' you found the most precious treasure and really you won't need things that people enjoy but which are in contrast to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
@@narcisioelmurza882 Peace as a by-product of conflict makes peace less important than war. It's like saying good is a by-product of evil !
@@narcisioelmurza882 God surely has no conflict with man, because God is omnipotent -- meaning nothing could possibly resist his power. So, if what you are saying makes any sense, you must be speaking metaphorically. Logically, nothing can resist an all-powerful force because any resistance to it would be a limit on its power. The 'conflict' you speak of is really a conflict within man between his desire for pleasure and his desire for peace.
@@narcisioelmurza882 Of course, people enjoy peace for the sake of peace -- until they get bored with it. Most people simply do not appreciate sacrifice as much as they take it for granted. Just ask any man or woman serving in the military.
@@narcisioelmurza882The obvious point you missed is that my original comment applies to the overwhelming majority of people. Of course, there are exceptions, the true followers of Christ -- that is, NOT people like yourself who reply to comments, you are definitely NOT a True Christian, because a True Christian would have simply read what I wrote, turned-the-other-cheek, and prayed for me. But like me, yours is the way of conflict and attack. That's what we are really about. Have a Blessed Day !
Don’t compare Jesus with socrates; socrates touched lil boys
he is just making points of logic and philosophy, not making them the same person of the likes. When did this event of Socrates doing such a thing happen?