Modernity and the destruction of the imagination

CENSORING PHANTASY: ABOLITION OF THE PHANTASMIC

Excerpts from Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Ioan P. Couliano


Chapter Nine

It is probably due to the influence of liberal Protestants that some history books still maintain that the Reformation was a movement of emancipation, whose aim was to free people from the repressive tutelage of the Catholic Church. Considering the multiplicity of Protestant sects, this idea might not be totally wrong, but it surely does not correspond to the original purposes of the Reformation, or to the ideologies of the main reformed denominations, Lutheranism and Calvinism. In leafing through history textbooks, we often come across this explanation of the Reformation: at the beginning of the sixteenth century there was a rich Church, organized into a powerful State and acting as such; the clergy and monks, for the most part, were also occupied with worldly things; trade in religious articles prospered; Luther came to end this situation through liberal reform: he granted the clergy the right to marry, he rescinded dealings in indulgences and the cult of images, he reduced to a minimum the external forms of ritual in order to concentrate on inward religious experience.

This is an explanation that takes results for causes and is satisfied with a moralistic point of view which, though useful in principle, is nevertheless dangerous in application. On the contrary, a breath of liberal air had been circulating in the Renaissance Church, which, through the cleavage between the modern mentality of the clergy and Christian morality, had led to many abuses. It was at this point that Luther arrived on the scene to reestablish the purity of the Christian message. Far from appearing as a liberal movement, the Reformation represented, on the contrary, a radical-conservative movement within the bosom of the Church, where it had several precursors (of whom it will suffice to mention here the preacher Savonarola in Florence). The Reformation did not claim to “emancipate” the individual; on the other hand it aimed to reestablish in the world a Christian order it believed the Catholic Church-which in its view had become a temporal institution-was unable to maintain. This is why the reformers consider the Church to be a supererogation which does not answer to the spirit of Christianity, and, by returning to the Bible, they intend not only to refute Catholicism but also to reestablish the original purity of the Christian community.

The revival of interest in eschatology, iconoclasm, rejection of traditional ecclesiastical practices, general participation in the creed, acceptance of marriage of the clergy as a malum necessarium permitted by St. Paul, are only a few aspects of the Reformation. Its most important result which, under the influence of Melanchthon, will in the final analysis be less apparent in the Lutheran Church than in that of John Calvin in Geneva and among the English Puritans, is the total rejection of the “pagan” culture of the Renaissance, of which the sale substitute is the study of the Bible. To attain this goal, the Protestant denominations do not hesitate to launch an intolerance which at first exceeded the intolerance of the Catholic Church, made more indulgent by the experience of the Renaissance. Characteristic of the Reformation is the fact that, recognizing no cultural reference other than the Bible, it repeated a situation in the history of primitive Christianity that corresponded to a phase of its birth: a Jewish sect engaging, rather hesitantly, in a dialogue with the Gentiles. Far from abrogating the Torah, the sect accepts the Old Testament as a whole, except to state that the life of the Christian is located not under the sign of the Law but under the sign of Grace. Now the Jewish religion is distinctive because, drawing its originality from the reaction against the Canaanitic cults, it has no graven images and it attempts to give a historical meaning to that which was represented by the neighboring peoples as periodical fertility cults. Hence, one of the most important goals of the Reformation is to root out the cult of idols from the Church. The results of this iconoclasm are tremendous if we consider the controversies about the Art of Memory aroused by Bruno in England: ultimately, the Reformation leads to a total censorship of the imaginary, since phantasms are none other than idols conceived by the inner sense.

Renaissance culture was a culture of the phantasmic. It lent tremendous weight to the phantasms evoked by inner sense and had developed to the utmost the human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms. It had created a whole dialectic of Eros in which phantasms, which at first foisted themselves upon inner sense, ended by being manipulated at will. It had a firm belief in the power of phantasms, which were transmitted by the phantasmic apparatus of the transmittor to that of the receiver. It also believed that inner sense was preeminently the locale for manifestations of transnatural forces-demons and the gods. By asserting the idolatrous and impious nature of phantasms, the Reformation abolished at one stroke the culture of the Renaissance. And, since all the Renaissance “sciences” were structures built on phantasms, they too had to be overpowered by the weight of the Reformation. But, we ask, what was the reaction of the Catholic Church? …the Church embarked on its own reform (which historians usually call the Counterreformation). Far from consolidating the positions assumed by Catholicism during the Renaissance, this movement severed itself completely from them and went in the same directions as protestantism. · It was along the lines of severity and harshness that the Reformation developed, from the Protestant as well as the Catholic side. The Counterreformation, however, has its own important characteristics. At the Council of Trent, which took place in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Church made clear its new style of behavior. It decided to assign the instrument of the Inquisition, which had been created in the twelfth century at the time of the anti-Cathar campaigns and had traditionally been in the hands of the Dominicans to anew, rigorous order dating from the sixteenth century: the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius of Loyola. Henceforth, the name of the Holy Inquisition is intertwined with that of the Jesuits.

In the spiritual practices of the Jesuits, the phantasmic culture of the Renaissance is revealed in all its power for the last time. Indeed, education of the imagination represents the teaching method of Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, printed in 1596. The disciple is called upon to practice a sort of Art of Memory. During these exercises he must imagine the atrocious tortures of Hell, the sufferings of humanity before the incarnation of Christ, the birth and childhood of the Lord, his preaching at Jerusalem-while Satan, from his dwelling place in Babylon, launches attacks by his demons throughout the world-and, finally, Calvary, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It is a question not of pure meditation but of an internal phantasmic theater in which the practitioner must imagine himself in a role of spectator. He is not only to record what happens but to observe the actors through the senses of sight, hearing, and touch (Secunda Hebdomada, dies I-VII). Introjected in his own phantasmic apparatus, the phantasm of the practitioner is to participate-in a more or less active way-in the development of the scenario.

Loyola’s exercises obviously derive from the great achievements of the Renaissance in the manipulation of phantasms. But here these phantasms are placed at the service of faith, to accomplish the reform of the Church, which amounts to saying that they are actively in opposition to the legacy of the Renaissance. In Loyola, we find that the culture of the phantasmic directs its weapons against itself. At the end of several decades, this process of self-destruction will be almost complete.

(ii) Some Historic Paradoxes

…. The Reformation interests me only to the extent that it produced censorship of the phantasmic and, consequently, a profound change in human imagination.

…In the seventeenth century we observe two curious phenomena: the Reformation comes to fruition, and people begin to think, to speak, to act, and to dress in an entirely new way, but this occurs in the Protestant faction as well as in the Catholic, so that, despite the external differences between the Churches, the difference between the spirit of the Protestant Reformation and the spirit of the Catholic one are reduced to empty questions, such as the dispensing of communion, the confession of sins, and marriage of the clergy. A process of normalization occurs now, finding expression in the appearance of a new culture with more or less unitary traits from London to Seville and from Amsterdam to Wittenberg, Paris, and Geneva. …Without abandoning its millenary traditions, the Catholic Church moves towards Protestantism; for its part, Protestantism, without giving up the reforms for which it had done victorious battle on the local front, becomes consolidated in big institutions which more and more resemble the Catholic Church. The Catholic faith and the Protestant denominations have drawn as close together as possible without being aware of it.

Henceforth it is no longer a question of Reformation and Counter-reformation. Ever unwilling to recognize it, the principal Western faiths no longer fight alone. Side by side, they build a common edifice: modern Western culture. Individuals can still harbor deep suspicions regarding those who, they think, are on the other side of the barricades. In their total adhesion to their party, to their institution, they do not even perceive that those they consider adversaries resemble them and that the conflict at issue is no longer the essence of Christianity but merely a few matters of internal organization. The pagan culture of the Renaissance has been vanquished. To that result Catholics and Protestants contributed equally, unaware that, far from fighting among themselves, they had done battle against a common enemy.

All of this seems quite simple without necessarily being so. The Reformation, at its inception, draws into its orbit-even though it disavows them almost immediately-an extremely varied series of movements of the “left,” on a scale that goes from liberalism to libertinism, from utopianism to the spirit of revolution, from antiauthoritarianism to egalitarianism. These movements had appeared as a direct result of the Renaissance and, in their most useful manifestations, worked in conformity with the spirit and “sciences” of the Renaissance. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a liberal and utopian Catholicism still exists, represented by Brother Tommaso Campanella, who, after more than twenty years of persecution, nevertheless finds a pope in need of his knowledge of spiritual magic. In his reclusion, Campanella is visited by one of Johann Valentin Andreae’s group of friends. The influence of the Calabrian monk on the liberal Protestant movement concealed behind the “farce” of the Rosicrucians cannot be ignored. The singularity of the great thinkers who gravitate around this movement a Robert Fludd, a Kepler, a Descartes, or a Bacon-is that they refuse to subject themselves entirely to the reformed religion and continue to seek their sources of inspiration in the culture of the Renaissance. We are at the beginnings of modern science, which represent a continuation of the Renaissance insofar as the great discoveries of the seventeenth century still derive from the postulate of analogies between microcosm and macrocosm and from a complex of Pythagorean ideas about the harmony of the world; we are also at the beginnings of a negation of the Renaissance, insofar as the spirit of the Reformation produces a substantial modification of the human imagination.

As for the liberal and utopian movements, persecuted by the official churches-in a Europe rigorously moralistic and divided between two powers which, though enemies in principle, have the same essential

spirit-they will finally gain an enormous underground influence in the form of secret societies. The progress of the spirit of liberal institutions represents another of history’s enigmas, outside the province of this book. In the beginning, Protestantism-be it Luther’s conservative movement in Germany or the Calvinist terror in Geneva or the Puritan terror in England-was certainly no more liberal than the Jesuits. Nevertheless, we see in England the appearance of democratic institutions, whereas the Jesuits, before their expulsion from Latin America, organized on that continent the first communist experiment in modern history and possibly the only one that ever worked. It is not impossible that these paradoxes can be explained as an extension-or a revenge-of the culture of the Renaissance?



(iii) The Controversy about Asinity

… Agrippa and Bruno were both impulsive men with an amazing incapacity to understand the people and situations surrounding them. But, whereas Agrippa seems to renounce (for the sake of form?) his past as an occultist and to enter the ranks of the reformers, Bruno aspires to defend his ideas even into martyrdom, convinced that people great in spirit do not flinch from physical pain. Agrippa is too naive to compromise but sufficiently realistic to retract his ideas; on the other hand, Bruno is too proud to retract, but, having yielded to impulse which let him down paths of no return, he still hopes to find a solution through compromise. Here again, he sins not through naivete but its opposite, excessive guile, which has the same result. We have cited some of Bruno’s attempts to convert his followers to the use of the Art of Memory. We recall that his Spaccio de La bestia trionfante was a rejection of the signs of the zodiac, replacing them with a veritable cohort of virtues and vices. By such means Bruno meant to give to the system of astrological memory a more abstract and Christian character. Bruno was not the first to have the concept of a “Christian sky.” ‘The Middle Ages wished to replace all the signs of the zodiac by others, borrowed from the Bible-which Hippolytus rejected, warning against astro-theosophists. A Carolingian poet (the priest Opicinus de Canistris, of Santa Maria Capella) proposed replacing the Ram by the Lamb (Christ), and, in 1627, Julius Schiller suggested, in his Coelum stellatum christianum, substituting the apostles for the signs of the zodiac. L’Astroscopium by Wilhelm Schickhardt, in 1665, sees the Ram as the animal of Isaac’s sacrifice, the Twins as Jacob and Esau, and connects the Fishes with the parable of the loaves and fishes. This was only one step removed from an entirely arbitrary interpretation. Opicinus de Canistris breached the gap by assimilation to Capricorn because his own sin was pride and sensuality.”

… It is appropriate to recall here that the Inquisition itself made ample use of the weapon of imagination, only it aimed it against the culture of the phantasmic age. The Christianization of the signs of the zodiac stems from a process of the same kind. However, no attempt of that sort had any chance of success with the English Puritans, who had yielded to the abstract mnemotechnics of Pierre de la Ramee. To the Puritans, who had cast icons out of their churches, an apostle or a beast of the zodiac merely represented idols conceived by the imagination. This is why Bruno speaks to the Puritans in language much better adapted to influencing them than the phantasies of Andreas Cellarius: he replaces the beasts of the zodiac with abstract entities. But, on that account, the concessions he makes to Ramism are so great that the principal characteristics of his own system of artificial memory eventually become blurred.

(v) A Single Reformation

If the Catholic Church did not abandon its cult of images and the celibacy of its priests, there are other fields in which the Reformation, both Protestant and Catholic, arrived at the same results. We have only to think of the persecution of witches or the fight against astrology and magic. …Protestants and Catholics do not agree on outward religious observances or on the question of the celibacy of the clergy. But in the seventeenth century they seem to be at one concerning the impious nature of the culture of the phantasmic era and the imaginary in general. Catholics and Lutherans, to be sure, are slightly more tolerant than Calvinists; but they believe just as firmly that the practice of any kind of divination is inspired by demons. Now the site of communication between demon and man is the mechanism of phantasy. That is why the number one enemy which all of Christianity must combat is human phantasy.

(vi) The Change in Ways of Envisaging the World

The censure of the imaginary and the wholesale rejection by strict Christian circles of the culture of the phantasmic age result in a radical change in the human imagination. Here again, the works of some historians of ideas betray an ineradicable prejudice: the belief that this change was caused by the advent of heliocentrism and the concept that the universe is infinite. There are writers to this day who assert seriously that Copernicus (or Bruno, which would be much more accurate) was at the bottom of a “revolution” that was not only scientific but psychological as well. According to them, the finite Thomist cosmos was able to quiet human anxieties, which exploded as soon as the belief in an infinite universe became generally accepted.

That would not be serious if it were only schoolboys that were taught fairy tales of this kind, though they too deserve something better. Unfortunately they circulate even in the most learned tracts and it would be in vain to hope for their immediate cessation. At issue are made-up ideas so convenient and superficial that no one bothers to refute them any more. They continue to circulate, from generation to generation, forming one of the most tenacious traditions of modern culture. Responsible for this is a certain linear concept of the progress of history, which everywhere seeks signs of “change” and “evolution.” Because he advanced a heliocentric image of our solar system, which is closer to scientific truth, Copernicus is identified with a key moment of change, of evolution, in short, of progress.

It is noteworthy that those who still maintain that heliocentrism and the infinity of the universe have had a disastrous effect on the psychic equilibrium of the individual and the masses also share those ideas, since they do not doubt that the “guilty” are men like Copernicus and Bruno. When we subject to more careful analysis the historic framework in which these important changes in perspective on the cosmos took place, we see that the cardinal of Cusa, Copernicus, and Bruno all have a hand in it. First, let us ask ourselves whether the Ptolemaic-Thomist system could have had an equilibratory psychological influence on the individual. Not at all, since it taught that we were located, as it were, in the garbage can of the universe, at its lowest point. In Aristotelian cosmology, the essential idea is not simply that the earth is located at the center of the universe but that it occupies the lowest point of the universe: that it is, so to speak, the negative pole of the whole cosmos and that in this attribute it is characterized not by a superfluity of being but almost by a want of being; it amounts to less than what there is above it.

It is against this concept that Nicholas of Cusa raises his voice in an effort to endow the earth with a dignity equal to that of every other star. In the Ptolemaic cosmos the individual is, in a way-not essentially, of course, but accidentally-refuse in the garbage can of the universe. The individual in the infinite cosmos of Nicholas of Cusa is a precious stone contributing to the beauty of the “piece of jewlry” (kosmos), to the harmony of the whole.

It is impossible to say why the latter hypothesis should have been more “disequilibratory” than the former. The same thing applies to heliocentrism, which the most inspired seventeenth- century theologians accepted willingly. …When we go back to the heart of the dispute over the two systems of the universe, we come across the same arguments that were still being repeated a quarter of a century ago, so that we are amazed that our contemporaries have so little imagination. The first argument that Smitho, a supporter of geocentrism, sets forth against Teofilo, a supporter of heliocentrism, in La Cena de Ie ceneri of Giordano Bruno is the following: “Holy Scripture … almost everywhere assumes the opposite” (Op. it., I, p. 91). Teofilo replies that the Bible is not a philosophic tract (that is to say, scientific) and that, in addressing the masses, it is only concerned with appearances. Smitho grants that he is right but also remarks that to address the masses with speech which contradicts appearances would be sheer folly (p. 92)….

….The idea of the infinitude of the universe is not the only one which, extolled in the Renaissance, strikes terror in succeeding eras. What a difference there is between the justification of human free will in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity and the agonizing sense of responsibility experienced by the Protestant Kierkegaard! The idea of liberty, which allowed man to belong to the higher beings, ends by becoming a crushing burden, for there are no longer any points of reference. As soon as God withdraws into his complete transcendence, every human attempt to examine his design runs into a ghastly silence. This “silence of God” is, in reality, silence of the world, silence of Nature. To read in the “book of Nature” had been the fundamental experience in the Renaissance. The Reformation was tireless in seeking ways to close that book. Why? Because the Reformation thought of Nature not as a factor for rapprochement but as the main thing responsible for the alienation of God from mankind. By dint of searching, the Reformation at last found the great culprit guilty of all the evils of individual and social existence: sinning Nature.

Diminished things

Bertrand Russell (a secularist thinker, entirely unmotivated by sympathy for religion):

It is not always realised how exceedingly abstract is the information that theoretical physics has to give. It lays down certain fundamental equations which enable it to deal with the logical structure of events, while leaving it completely unknown what is the intrinsic character of the events that have the structure. We only know the intrinsic character of events when they happen to us. Nothing whatever in theoretical physics enables us to say anything about the intrinsic character of events elsewhere. They may be just like the events that happen to us, or they may be totally different in strictly unimaginable ways. All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (My Philosophical Development, p. 13)

In other words, science doesn't tell us what a thing is, its inner nature. Science leaves out the thing, the reality, and gives us merely the abstract descriptions of the thing. 

HERE is Peter Leithart on William Desmond :



Modern thought is often materialist. Whatever happens to spirit in such an outlook, at least we’ve got things left. Right?

Not so, argues William Desmond ( Being and the Between ) . The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, he says, is a “classic bifurcation of thinghood into two extremes of objectivism and subjectivism.” It ends up diminishing things “on two fronts. On the one hand, objectivity contracts the range of concreteness. On the other hand, subjectivity is placed outside of the thing in a mind that has essentially nothing to do with things in themselves . . . . Equivocity is influential here in the very negative sense that a difference gets erected into a dualism of opposites.”

Citing Descartes’s distinction of  res extensa and  res cogitans , he argues that “Thinghood has been de-selved, objectified, reified in a homogeneous neutralization of thereness; selfhood has been abstracted from things in their concretenes and hovers mathematically over the quantitative homogeneity of exeternality, ready to impose the categories of its mathesis on that homogeneity.” 

Thus, “really there are  no things in Descartes. In different but related senses, there are also no things in Newton and Hume. The thing is decomposed under the gaze of the objectifying, univocalizing mind.” As an alternative, Desmon suggests that we have to learn to think “beyond univocity,” and recognize the “aesthetic presencing” of things that “present themselves” and are recognized as such “when the mind as other is in proper community with them, in proper rapport with things.” 

Again: “If things pluralize themselves, they are plurivocal in themselves. They utter themselves; they outer themselves; they bespeak themselves in more ways than one. I suggest that our plural perspectives on them is in response to this plurivocity of the thing itself. The diferentiation of the thing is just this, its qualitative plurivocalization . . . . A thing may be small or big, or may be big and small, depending on perspective, but this seeming contradiction is not something that comes from the outside of the thing itself. The thing presents itself plurivocally.” Seeing “as” doesn’t cancel “seeing is”: “When we see a thing as other, we may really be seeing it as it is.” 

Perspectivism isn’t relativistic in this case, but a hint of the multiple richness and plural presencing of things. In fact, perspectivism seems relativistic only when things are already diminished, only if things are univocally objects and their plurality a function of subjectivity. Nietzchean perspectivism is relativistic only when one retains the modern prejudice about things, which, as Desmond has argued, actually loses things.

Practice, not belief, is primary - Our doings precede our thinkings.

"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."

- Francis Martin

James KA Smith uses George Lindbeck to defend that Christianity is more like a culture than an intellectual system, the following are some excerpts from his book Who's Afraid of Relativism : 

Christianity is a “form of life” found first and foremost in the community of practice that is the church. In other words, Christian faith (and religion more generally) is a kind of know-how; theology and doctrine, then, “make explicit” our know-how as know-that claims, articulating the norms implicit in the practices of the community that is the body of Christ.

Doctrines are, in a sense, derivative from practice. 

Religion (e.g., Christianity) is not a set of propositions that one believes but rather a (communal) way of life. Religion will be a matter more of initiation than of information, a matter of know-how before it ever becomes a matter of know-that.

In the cultural-linguistic model, “religions are seen as comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world”  Contrary to the cognitive-propositional model, religion is“not primarily an array of beliefs” but more like a “set' of skills” . 

But contrary to the individualism and subjective-approach, the culturaI-linguistic model emphasizes the essentially communal character of religion: 

“Like a culture or language, it is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities” . 

Discipleship, then, is a kind of acculturation: 

"To become religious involves becoming skilled in the language, the symbol system of a given religion. To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one's world in its terms" . In short, a religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices precede and shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways. It takes a village to have an "experience." 

In a way, one needs to "try on" a whole new "picture"—be inculcated into a new (theoretical) practice—in order to he able to see the whole anew. And the only "proof" or demonstration that is possible, then, is the power of the new picture to help one make sense of the whole, and to feel its superiority to one's prior account.

Lindbeck's is a "cultural" model of religion because it emphasizes these dynamics of formation, socialization, and acculturation—all of which happen on the (implicit) level of know-how. The model is "linguistic" because this is how we learn a first language: it is caught, not taught. "To become religious—no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent—is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. 

One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly "articulated."A religion works like a language in this respect: "It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and nondiscursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which this vocabulary can he meaningfully deployed" . 

Note that final emphasis: this is a language to be used, put to work in a way of life. 

Our doings precede our thinkings. Practice is primary. 

A comprehensive scheme or story used to structure all dimensions of existence is not primarily a set of propositions to be believed, but is rather the medium in which one moves, a set of skills that one employs in living one’s life. Its vocabulary of symbols and its syntax may be used for many purposes, only one of which is the formulation of statements about reality. Thus while a religion’s truth claims are often of the utmost importance to it (as in the case of Christianity), it is, nevertheless, the conceptual vocabulary and the syntax or inner logic which determine the kinds of truth claims the religion can make. The cognitive aspect, while often important, is not primary. - Lindbeck

So the real question is - What does doctrine do ?

In the cognitive-propositional, doctrines are primarily used to make truth claims; in the experiential- expressive, doctrines are used to express interior feelings and experiences. “The function of church doctrines that becomes most prominent” in the cultural-linguistic model “is their use, not as expressive symbols or as truth claims, but as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action.” 

If doctrines function as “rules” for the community of (religious) practice, this is only because those doctrines make explicit the norms that were already embedded in the community’s practiceIn other words, doctrines make explicit the know-how that was already implicit in our practice. To confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”is to articulate what was already implicit in our prayers, a worshipful way of life nourished by the Scriptures.

Narrative coherence has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.

For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.

The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic." Which of these is a good move, a good inference, is inextricably bound to the matter of the community of practice who are heirs of the apostles' teaching, who receive and read and inhabit the world of Scripture, and who pray to Jesus. That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense. In doing so, the community of practice is able to discern what counts as faithful practice. 

Doctrines are, in very real way, derivative from practice. 

Doctrines are not about the world or God, but how we can speak about those things on the first order level of prayer and proclamation...

Inferential, not referential claims…regulate truth claims…they make explicit the norms already in Christian practice…and then we can harmonize our commitments, renew or redirect our practices.

Doctrine is not synonymous with religion, nor is it either the center or foundation of religion. Religion is located primarily in our doings, in the practices that constitute a community of worship and devotion to God.

Part of the scandal of the cross is that the cross cannot be understood for what it is apart from one’s being enfolded into the community of practice that confesses “Jesus is Lord.”Our knowledge of this reality is relative to, and dependent upon, the Spirited community of practice that is the church.We are dependent upon such a communal context as the condition for understanding this as “the true story of the whole world. 

After all, Pagan converts to the catholic mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christians; rather, the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood. More precisely, they were first attracted by the Christian community and form of life.

Only Love perceives Love

In Love Alone Is Credible, von Balthasar delves deeper into this exploration of what love means, what makes the divine love of God, and how we must become lovers of God in the footsteps of saints like Francis de Sales, John of the Cross and Therese of Lisieux.

This excerpt from Love Alone Is Credible is chapter 5, "Love Must Be Perceived."



If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other. The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love. In order for a selfish beloved to understand the selfless love of a lover (not only as something he can use, which happens to serve better than other things, but rather as what it truly is), he must already have some glimmer of love, some initial sense of what it is.


Similarly, a person who contemplates a great work of art has to have a gift–whether inborn or acquired through training–to be able to perceive and assess its beauty, to distinguish it from mediocre art or kitsch. This preparation of the subject, which raises him up to the revealed object and tunes him to it, is for the individual person the disposition we could call the threefold unity of faith, hope, and love, a disposition that must already be present at least in an inchoative way in the very first genuine encounter. And it can be thus present because the love of God, which is of course grace, necessarily includes in itself its own conditions of recognizability and therefore brings this possibility with it and communicates it.

After a mother has smiled at her child for many days and weeks, she finally receives her child's smile in response. She has awakened love in the heart of her child, and as the child awakens to love, it also awakens to knowledge: the initially empty-sense impressions gather meaningfully around the core of the Thou. Knowledge (with its whole complex of intuition and concept) comes into play, because the play of love has already begun beforehand, initiated by the mother, the transcendent. God interprets himself to man as love in the same way: he radiates love, which kindles the light of love in the heart of man, and it is precisely this light that allows man to perceive this, the absolute Love: "For it is the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness', who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor 4:6).


In this face, the primal foundation of being smiles at us as a mother and as a father. insofar as we are his creatures, the seed of love lies dormant within us as the image of God (imago). But just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace–in the image of his Son.

Prior to an individual's encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history, however, there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter, which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man. There has to be an encounter, in which the unilateral movement of God's love toward man is understood as such and that means also appropriately received and answered. If man’s response were not suited to the love offered, then it would not in fact be revealed (for, this love cannot be revealed merely ontologically, but must be revealed at the same time in a spiritual and conscious way).

But if God could not take this response for granted from the outset, by including it within the unilateral movement of his grace toward man, then the relationship would be bilateral from the first, which would imply a reduction back into the anthropological schema. The Holy Scriptures, taken in isolation, cannot provide the word of response, because the letter kills when it is separated from the spirit, and the letter's inner spirit is God's word and not man's answer. Rather, it can be only the living response of love from a human spirit, as it is accomplished in man through God's loving grace: the response of the "Bride", who in grace calls out, "Come!" (Rev 22:17) and, "Let it be to me according to your word" (Lk 1:38), who "carries within the seed of God" and therefore "does not sin" (i jn 3:9), but "kept all of these things, pondering them in her heart" (Lk 2:19, 51), She, the pure one, is "placed, blameless and glorious" (Eph 5:26-27; 2 Cor 11:2) before him, by the blood of God's love, as the "handmaid" (Lk 1:38), as the "lowly servant" (Lk 1:48), and thus as the paradigm of the loving faith that accepts all things (Lk 1:45; 1I:28) and "looks to him in reverent modesty, submissive before him' (Eph 5:24, 33; Col 3:18).

Had the love that God poured out into the darkness of nonlove not itself generated this womb (Mary was pre-redeemed by the grace of the Cross; in other words, she is the first fruit of God's self-outpouring into the night of vanity), then this love would never have penetrated the night and it would never in fact have had the capacity to do so (as a serious reading of Luther's justus-et-peccator theology illuminates in this regard). To the contrary, an original and creaturely act of letting this be done (fiat) has to correspond to this divine event, a bridal fiat to the Bridegroom. But the bride must receive herself purely from the Bridegroom ([kecharitoméne] Lk 1:28); she must be "brought forward" and "prepared" by him and for him ([paristánai] 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:27)[1] and therefore at his exclusive disposal, offered up to him (as it is expressed in the word [paristánai]; cf. the "presentation" in the temple, Lk 2:22 and Rom 6:13f; 12:1; Col 1:22, 28).

This originally justified relationship of love (because it does justice to the reality) in itself threads together in a single knot all the conditions for man's perception of divine love: (1) the Church as the spot less Bride in her core, (2) Mary, the Mother-Bride, as the locus, at the heart of the Church, where the fiat of the response and reception is real, (3) the Bible, which as spirit (-witness) can be nothing other than the Word of God bound together in an indissoluble unity with the response of faith.


A "critical" study of this Word as a human, historical document will therefore necessarily run up against the reciprocal, nuptial relationship of word and faith in the witness of the Scripture. The "hermeneutical circle" justifies the formal correctness of the word even before the truth of the content is proven. But it can, and must, be shown that, in the relationship of this faith to this Word, the content of the Word consists in faith, understood as the handmaid's fiat to the mystery of the outpouring of divine love. But insofar as the Word of Scripture belongs to the Bride-Church, since she gives articulation to the Word that comes alive in her, then (4) the Bride and Mother, who is the archetype of faith, must proclaim this Word, in a living way, to the individual as the living Word of God; and the function of preaching (as a "holy and serving office"), like the Church herself and even the Word of Scripture, must be implanted by the revelation of God himself, as an answer to that revelation, as it is illuminated by the relationship between the Church and the Bible.

To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love. But this occurs only in grace, that is, by virtue of God's original gift of a loving response that is adequate to God's loving Word. And therefore, the creature responds in connection with, and "under the protective mantle" of, the fiat that the Bride-Mother, Mary-Ecclesia, utters in an archetypal fashion, once and for all. [2]

It is not necessary to measure the full scope of the faith achieved in human simplicity and in veiled consciousness in the chamber at Nazareth and in the collegiurn of the apostles. For the unseen seed that was planted here needed the dimensions of the spirit or intellect to germinate: dimensions that, once again, stand out in a fundamental and archetypal way in the Word of Scripture, but which first unfold in the contemplation of the biblical tradition over the course of centuries–"written on the tables of our hearts" and henceforth "to be known and read by all men" (2 Cor 3:2-3), written "in persuasive demonstrations of spirit and power", spirit as power and power as spirit (i Cor 2:4). That which the "Spirit" of God, however, interprets in our hearts with "power" (and which the Church interprets in "service to the Spirit" [2 Cor 3:8]) is nothing other than God's own outpouring of love in Christ; indeed, the Spirit is the outpouring of the Son of God, "the Spirit of the Lord" (2 Cor 3:18), since the Lord himself "is Spirit" (2 Cor 3:17).

When Christ is immediately thereafter designated the "Image of God" (2 Cor 4:4), then this expression ought not to be reduced to mythical terms, since myth was definitively left behind with the dimension of the Incarnation of the Word, which surpassed it. He is the "Image", which is not a merely natural or symbolic expression, but a Word, a free self-communication, and precisely therefore a Word that is always already (in the grace of the Word) heard, understood, and taken in, otherwise, there would be no revelation. There is no such thing as a "dialogical image", except that which exists at the higher level of the Word, although it remains true–and contrary to what Protestant and existential theology may claim–that the Word preserves and elevates in itself all the value of the image at the higher level of freedom. if the Word made man is originally a dialogical Word (and not merely in a second moment), then it becomes clear that even the level of the unilateral (ethical-religious) teaching of knowledge has been surpassed.


It is not possible that Christ could have written books ("about" something, whether about himself, about God, or about his teaching); the book "about" him must concern the trans-action between him and the man whom he has encountered, addressed, and redeemed in love. This means that the level on which his Holy Spirit expresses himself (in the letter), must necessarily itself be "in the spirit" (of the love of revelation and the love of faith), in order to be "objective" at all. To put it another way, the site from which love can be observed and generated cannot itself lie outside of love (in the "pure logicity" of so-called science); it can lie only there, where the matter itself lies–namely, in the drama of love. No exegesis can dispense with this fundamental principle to the extent that it wishes to do justice to its subject matter.

The Triumph of abstraction over reality : against human rights

Below I reproduce MATT DINAN's reveiw of Natural Law and Human Rights: Toward a Recovery of Practical Reason by Pierre Manent found HERE :

“Modernity” is a relational, even reactionary, term of distinction. The Latin modus means “just now,” as opposed to “back then.” To be modern means to live in the past pluperfect, to have rejected some antiquity, whereas previous epochs were not only less self-consciously epochal but also seemed to have no problem with allowing one to be world-weary. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the modern world is that we are expected to show enthusiasm for it. Even critiques of modernity must reckon with the marvels of modern technology. 

Natural Law and Human Rights, the new book by formidable French political theorist Pierre Manent, provides another framework for understanding the proliferation of these critiques of modernity. Manent advances the atypical view that the modern crisis is one not of reflection but of action—that the modern problem is precisely the belief that our problems can be solved by thinking about them. Thus, the book addresses a theoretical discourse—human rights—that seems unfashionable on the intellectual left, and proposes to replace it with natural law, a theoretical tool that feels out of step with an increasingly populist right. 

But in his focus on political action, Manent correctly identifies that though academia and intellectual magazines may speak Foucault, the worlds of government, policy, and law speak the language of human rights. Concerned by the incompatibility of such language with the necessary grammar of political action, Manent offers instead a novel formulation of natural law designed to recover the “archic” (i.e., rule-based) character of human agency.

Natural Law and Human Rights follows the familiar arc of the “crisis of modernity” genre. There’s the exposition of the contemporary crisis; the fingering of the culprit (usually concentrated in one figure, image, or concept); the historical narrative (which joins culprit to crisis); and a final section devoted to some alternative or indicating what is needful. Almost universally, the strength of such books lies in two of these four elements: the identification of the crisis and the description of the culprit. This book is no exception. 

The crisis, in this case, is the way in which our regnant political discourse “stimulates our desire to judge while at the same time constraining our faculty of judgment.” Human rights presents itself as superior to law but is unwilling to condemn injustice in the cultural other “since judgment would risk leading to the conclusion that this way of life is inferior, which goes against the principle of equality that lies at the heart of the idea of human rights.” Manent’s example is the European propensity to condemn political positions held by traditionalist Christians about abortion or LGBTQ+ equality while refraining from judging similar perspectives held by non-Europeans. Manent argues that the tension persists because there is no alternative: Human rights discourse smuggles in a robust concept of nature, even as it criticizes the possibility of a natural basis for human things.

The “culprit” in Manent’s story is the view of nature developed by the early theorists of modern natural right. When thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau had recourse to a “state of nature” in order to locate humanity’s natural freedom and equality, they did so by “reducing us to the most impoverished common denominator,” heavily emphasizing “the separate individual” and “the fact of separation itself.” The bearers of rights are no longer recognizably “human,” but defined “by the fact that they are identical, or similar, and separate.” It then follows that, as Hobbes puts it, the differences in “manners” and “customs” are mere labels applied to a denuded substratum. Therefore, Manent writes, that which has been “constructed” by and onto the separate “individual living being” can be “deconstructed” as necessary. 

More radically, it now becomes the vocation of the human sciences to undertake “an unceasing effort to authorize and encourage the individual living being to recompose all the significant elements of the human world in order to make them conform to the idea that he has of himself.” This process of mediation is the transformation of the various qualities of human existence into concrete human rights. The law of the Sabbath, or the mere observation that rest and leisure are necessary and good, becomes the human right to paid vacation. But knowing my rights does not tell me much about what makes for a life well lived: The image of the good life is presented only negatively.

The central chapters of Natural Law and Human Rights duly provide a historical narrative connecting culprit to crisis. Manent’s analysis of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau covers well-worn ground in the political theory literature, and scholars interested in how context contributes to the development of political ideas will find little of interest here. Nevertheless, Manent’s interpretation of what is perhaps the central passage in Machiavelli’s The Prince is fresh and daring. 

Describing the ways in which he has departed from the orders of others, Machiavelli writes, “And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.” One standard interpretation of that passage is that Machiavelli is leaving behind the imagination of things and turning, instead, toward the effectual truth—the truth as revealed by cause and effect, the truth that gets results. Manent, however, reads against the grain: Machiavelli is describing the significant gap that exists between what I do and what I believe I should do. The natural response to such a failing is an attempt to “close” the gap, to try to better align my words to my deeds. But don’t we usually fail to attain the good ends we set out to achieve, precisely because we are seeking our preservation instead of our ruin? 

For Manent, in observing this gap, Machiavelli is offended not by its practical consequences but by its theoretical ones, by what Manent somewhat infelicitously calls humanity’s “gnoseological failure”: We fail not so much in doing as in correctly understanding our own actions. Rather than attempt to close or prevent this gap between law and action, Machiavelli, in Manent’s telling, elaborates “a nonpractical view of action—an action greater than action, or in any case an action no longer subject to the limits that spring from the fact that action is naturally produced by an agent.” 

The possibility of human agency is determined no longer by what is just and noble, nor by the constraints imposed by my resources or my character, but by my ability to respond to events as they present themselves. I am no longer myself, but a generalized—and generalizable—theoretical agent, whose freedom does not quail before the law. The gap between ought and isdisappears because the realm of practice does. In this way, the uncertainty of any practical undertaking is dislodged by the certainty of theory. In a strange twist, the apparent “realism” of Machiavelli is actually a pivot toward the complete eclipse of practice by theory.

The rest of the central narrative of Natural Law and Human Rights develops the far-reaching consequences of modernity’s “theoretical hypertrophy,” its abstraction from the human things to the separate individual being. Manent focuses on Hobbes’s role in systematizing the “gnoseological” decision of Machiavelli. Hobbes defines politics not by thinking about what politics is but by attempting to answer theoretical questions about nature. He thus locks in Machiavelli’s turn away from practice in the interest of a separate individual who must scientifically reconstitute the human world, reproducing the supposedly theoretical state of nature in the modern social state. Bringing about the lonely freedom and equality of the state of nature definitively closes the gap between law and life. 

But as any student of modern political thought can tell you, Machiavelli and Hobbes mark only the beginning—what Leo Strauss calls the “first wave”—of modernity. When Manent brings up Rousseau, he does so not to discuss Rousseau’s “discovery” of history, but to emphasize his continuity with Hobbes. Manent does not address later modern thinkers, but it is not difficult to see how such thinkers remain essentially within the same modern project that was inaugurated by Machiavelli. The turn from nature to history inaugurated by Rousseau is a way of further closing the gap between law and action. The historicist emphasis on the contextual roots of action further complicates human agency. The “gap” between law and world ceases to exist if the human world is determined by historical necessity. Indeed, the definitive closure of the gap comes in Hegel’s compact and imperious dictum that the actual is the rational, and by Marx’s transposition of this observation onto material conditions. When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says we must look at all of history and say “Thus I willed it,” he is only making explicit what is barely implicit in Machiavelli. 

The final stage in any critique of modernity is the alternative, or the way forward. This is the most perilous moment in the genre, when, having attempted to knock down the modern edifice, the critic must lay a foundation for a new one. Manent aims to revitalize action through a novel conception of natural law. Whereas such accounts usually rely on a theory of natural teleology, Manent recognizes that to undertake such a conceptualization is to remain “a prisoner of the theoretical view that it shares with the philosophy of rights.” Manent instead provides a sort of Aristotle-inspired phenomenology of action or agency, observing that “there is no human being who is not moved by the pleasant, the useful, and the honest (the just, the noble).” An agent’s motivations are not open to revision or manipulation; we may disagree about which objects are truly useful, pleasant, or noble, but we remain bound by nonnegotiable categories. 

By focusing on these motives for action, Manent tries to avoid a “dogmatically explicit” list of dos and don’ts and leave room for the “play” appropriate to practical life. Thus understood, natural law always “leaves room to deliberate and then to choose.” Rather than resolve into a passive understanding of the separate, autonomous being, real choices are always made, Manent shows, by distinct persons with characters and histories, and within the context of actual political communities. Affirming natural law in Manent’s sense grounds us in a human world that is given, not made by us. By realizing the solidity of human motivations, we can begin to develop the prudence required for good judgment, and even Christian conscience. Manent calls this a “gentle slope” from “is” to “ought.” His goal for all of this is a sober and dignified vision of a practicable, attainable, distinctively human life: “Where the natural law is concerned, humanity in its ordinary or current conditions is not this mass of perdition that the law condemns, but so many actors who take much and often fall short, who are ceaselessly straying further from and coming closer to this law of nature that does not define an ideal, but helps us to find the point of equilibrium and the optimal rule for a happy life, that is to say a reasonably pleasant, useful, and noble life.” 

Natural Law and Human Rights thus contributes to the critique of modernity with the observation that modernity is not only a theoretical distinction about the relationship of law to life, but a decision in favor of the authority of theoretical distinctions over the prescientific experience of human life. In an insidious way, we understand ourselves as relentlessly pragmatic, realist, or empiricist, when in fact we mediate our naive experiences of life through the lens of theory. Modernity needs to be revealed to us, because it so successfully hides its true character, insulating itself against revision and correction. 

Controversial though it may be, this claim seems sound—we are given over to reflection in such a way as to lose the appearances, the phainomenai, of human life, so that the various options of how we might live it are hidden from us. Manent’s focus on recovering the prediscursive character of human agency does little, however, to help us understand specifically how to go about effecting this recovery. The problem is that such an approach would seem to require that he refrain from some of the specific judgments he does make on contemporary controversies—about the redistribution of wealth and the relation of modernity to questions of gender and sexuality, in particular—which are not supported by the modest concept of natural law he defends in his book. Nevertheless, Manent provides a framework within which such prudential questions can be meaningfully arbitrated. But, more importantly, the space his practical view leaves open for forgiveness when we attend to the reality of the gap between law and life lowers the stakes of such discussions, and creates a space in which we might venture being wrong.

Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review 22.2 (Summer 2020). This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission. Please contact The Hedgehog Review for further details.

How is Science possible ? Whitehead answers.

Although his estate for years claimed this essay was destroyed in a fire, apparently that was a lie. Just published this year, Whitehead’s first lecture at Harvard, delivered in September 1924, focuses on the metaphysical possibility of modern natural science, below is most of it, but can be read in it's entirety HERE


You can also hear it read on youtube below

In this lecture we want to elucidate what science is in itself. We ask what is the true character of this great unexpected movement of human thought issuing in modern science. How does it arise, and what is it now that it has arisen?..

If we look to the nature of things, the truth is that all things are interconnected. There are no autonomous entities or groups of entities. If the human body is composed of com- pounds of carbon, it will behave as compounds of carbon do behave; and we must call in the chemist to inform us upon that question.

In conformity with this principle of unity, we must hold that Philosophy and even Theology are capable of rendering services very necessary for Natural Science, in so far as those two sciences have themselves arrived at any formulations which are sufficiently true. Furthermore, there is some cause to believe that even medieval Western Theology, obstructive as it has been over details, has in a general way in the past rendered incalculable service in fostering the scientific spirit. At the present time, there is in every country a corps of eager scientific workers. Our present epoch is a stage of utilisation, which issues in our general support of science, and in our keen sense of its importance. But this attitude is very recent.

It is true that, wherever men are civilised, there is the stage of wonder, of romance. But how does romance pass into precise investigation, and thus generate science. The spur to this transition is the unconquerable belief that there are great simple truths dominating the complexity of appearance. Without such a belief, what is the good of precise investigation?

It would be natural to believe that things happen one way one day, and another way another day, and that all the order there is lies on the surface of things, such as the succession of the seasons. In the great civilisations of Eastern Asia, civilisations older and more continuous than ours, when men wondered they retired to mountains and to monasteries, and continued to wonder. There was nothing else to be done....

The pursuit of science presumes that the nature of things is adjusted in every detail with inflexible rationality. For example, we know something of the molecular nature of chemical elements, and we observe the complexity of the lines in the spectra due to light from these elements. Throughout Europe and America our spectroscopists are searching with the most detailed analysis to discover the correlations between the characteristic atom of a substance and the characteristic spectrum it emits. 

But why should there be any such correlation to be discovered. We do in fact believe that there is one, simply and solely because we believe that there is in every detail a rational adjustment in the properties of connected things. If a thing behaves one way at one time, and another way at another time, we believe that there are other determinate factors, which we have overlooked, to which the variation is due. Now there can be no justification for this ultimate motive towards scientific investigation, except our knowledge of something in the very nature of reality which justifies it. It is the weakness of Hume’s philosophy and of its modern derivatives that it gives no such justification. Furthermore, it gives no reason to believe that, because scientific generalisations have been discovered in the past, there are any more to be discovered in the future. Nor does this philosophy even give any reason to suppose that the generalisations which worked in the past will continue to work in the future.

The motive towards science must include an intimate conviction in the ultimate rationality of things in their minutest detail. A Cambridge mathematician once expressed this to me by the outburst—‘I assume that there is a fundamental decency of things’. Speaking generally the men of Asia generated but little science because they had a weak hold upon this fundamental decency of things. Their Theology presented them with a God either too arbitrary or too inert to make the Universe safe for decency. 

The men of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inherited from the middle ages the impression of scholastic theology with its insistence upon the rationality of the nature of God. Indeed it was over-impressed upon them, so that they thought that they could deduce the motions of the planets from their knowledge of that nature, a knowledge which they sadly over-estimated. But as soon as it was realised that there was no substitute for looking at the facts, modern science was generated by this union of the method of observation with unquestioned belief in the decency of the Universe. Without Scholastic Theology it is not likely that, so far as science is concerned, Western Europe would have surpassed Eastern China. It all depended on the habit of mind which came from a belief in an active rational God who attends personally to every detail.

We are, most of us, not in a mood to receive our ideas of Providence from Scholastic Theology. But our trust in science demands a metaphysic which equally supports this belief in the coherent rationality of things.

It is one of the many great merits of Immanuel Kant as a Philosopher that, being also a Scientist, he realised that meta- physics has to satisfy this condition. You will not ask me, in an aside in this lecture, to explain the general character of the Kantian solution.

The principle on which he proceeded was to ascribe to our process of cognition, a function analogous to that exercised by Mrs. Grundy over morals in the social world and by the late Mr. Bowdlear in his edition of Shakespeare. According to Kant we never know the real things, but only an édition de luxe which has been expurgated into rationality.

But although nobody, so far as I am aware, takes seriously Kant’s exact theory of things in themselves, I cannot understand how anyone who lays emphasis on the problem which he set himself to solve, can doubt but that his work forms a turning point in the progress of metaphysics. The process of cognition is merely one type of relationship between things which occurs in the general becoming of reality. The becoming of relationships between things requires that the things which become related should be such as to be capable of these relations. Accordingly the fact of any particular entity form- ing an element in a united Universe which is in the process of becoming, imposes upon that Universe the obligation of being patient of it. Thus every particular entity, by reason of what we may call its relational essence, imposes upon the rest of things a certain systematic character whereby they tolerate its possibility of reality. Kant worked out this theory for the particular case of an entity capable of the relation of cognisance in the capacity of cognisant. He asked, How is cognisance possible? I suggest to you the more general question, How is any particular entity possible having regard to the relationships which it presupposes? It is along this line of thought that—at least in my opinion—metaphysics will be able to deal with another, and very analogous, problem for which science looks to metaphysics for explanation; I mean the problem of Induc- tive Logic.

Why are the generalisations of Inductive Logic sensible procedures? I do not mean what are the particular precautions to be taken in order that these generalisations may carry the greatest weight. This latter problem was discussed by Mill in the famous second volume of his Logic and also by Venn in his Inductive Logic, and later by statisticians such as Karl Pearson. The problem which I am thinking of is the more fundamental one, Why should these generalisations carry any probability whatsoever, however carefully they are conducted? I have no doubt but that they ought to carry about the amount of probability which all men in practice ascribe to them. It follows therefore that a meta- physical description of the nature of things must account for the fact that inductive reasoning can give knowledge respecting the Universe.

The point is this:— How can our knowledge of one fact A give us any knowledge of another fact B which is not included in fact A? As Hume points out, it is no good protesting that no cautious reasoner does depend for his induction on one fact only. In the first place, if the one fact A can give no information of any kind as to fact B, it is quite obvious that 100 facts, A1, A2, . . . A100, each of which separately has no bearing at all upon B, cannot in conjunction afford any information as to B. Hume affirms this position, and I cannot see any escape from it. Accordingly, the consideration as to how to generalise with comparative safety from a large number of particular facts—the sort of consideration which was undertaken by Bacon, and Mill, and Karl Pearson— affords no answer to this problem. We have got first to solve the preliminary problem, as to how one particular fact can afford information, however/slight, about any particular fact. When we have settled this point, there can be no difficulty in understanding that 100 relevant facts can afford much more information when properly analysed. 

But the root question is, How can one fact be relevant to another fact which is not included in it? Science collapses if you once admit an independent atomicity of facts.

In the second place, you do not get out of the difficulty by introducing probability. If fact A is entirely irrelevant to fact B, it can make nothing probable as to B. You can never get rid of your question, as to how particulars can be relevant to other particulars.

Thirdly, you do not get rid of the difficulty by saying that in practice nobody doubts it. We are all agreed there. We are only asking that a metaphysical description of the general nature of the Universe should account for this procedure, which is essential to science, and which is such that nobody doubts it.

Fourthly, no help is to be got by basing your trust on past experience. You can in this way explain—as Hume explained— your habit of making these generalisations. But when you are convinced of the truth of this explanation of the habit, you ought to find your belief in its rationality rather weakened than otherwise. Apparently there has been a run of luck, and the human race has slid into indefensible habits of thought. Furthermore, if the present is irrelevant to the future, the past was irrelevant to the present. Accordingly, our memory, which is a present fact, is merely delusive if we take it as giving [no] knowledge of the past. You cannot evade accounting for the relevance of a particular fact A to another particular fact B. The answer which I would give in outline is that the becom- ingness of reality is a process of exhibiting the togetherness of things, and that this togetherness is essential. 

Accordingly, any one entity X which is realised requires of the rest of real- ity a patience of the entry of X into that togetherness. From the point of view of X, I call this the significance of X, and from the point of view of the rest of the Universe, I call it the patience of reality for X. Now a fact A is a complex of many inter-related entities X1, . . . Xn together with their relatedness in A. Thus in some way or other, such a complex entity as A has significance as to the constitution of all reality, and in particular, may well have important significance as to the possible constitution of some other fact B.

The Togetherness of Things

I wish to make it evident that the first step in the Philosophy of Science is the consideration of the togetherness of things. As we look around—either in perception or thought—we do not find things in isolation. For example, we do not find one horse, out of time and out of space, disjoined from the rest of creation. Zoology does not take its start from the examination of such isolated entities. There could not even be a horse without time and space. The very idea of a non-temporal, non-spatial horse is nonsense. It is not wrong; because it has no meaning at all, and cannot arrive at the dignity of rightness or wrongness. What we mean by an individual horse requires time and space in order to show its points.

But time and space simply exhibit aspects of the way in which things are together with each other. Thus, to say that a non-temporal, non-spatial horse is an unmeaning collection of ideas, is merely another way of saying that there can be no such thing as a horse apart from its togetherness with other things. I am not talking of where a horse will be happiest, or survive longest, but of the general character of the togetherness which is necessary for the very being of a horse. For example, a horse is happy when galloping over grass downs, it could exist for a few seconds under water at the bottom of the English Channel, and for a very small fraction of a second somewhere between the Sun and Sirius, even if those two stars were blot- ted out. 

But, apart from its systematic togetherness with the electromagnetic field required by its electrons, there can be no horse even for a billion billionth of a second. A certain systematic type of togetherness is required for the very being of a horse. Apart from that, it cannot even proceed to die. The happiness of the horse, producing its continued survival, issues from conditions of reality which retain the horse as a realised value in the system of things. It is in this sense that I call every individual entity ‘abstract’. Because every such entity presupposes a definite togetherness with other things. This togetherness must have a certain general systematic character in order that there may be such an entity at all—for example, a horse requires spatial and temporal relations with other things. But also in every particular instance, the togetherness will have accidental characters which might be otherwise, though they must be definite. For example, a definite horse at the present moment is either in London in the Strand opposite Charing Cross, or in South America, or on the surface of the moon, or somewhere else. It must have definite relations to other things in time and space; and what those other things are is somewhat accidental, though there is usually a historical explanation.

When we consider an entity by itself, we ignore this togetherness except those aspects of its general systematic character which are necessary to give meaning to our thoughts. But no definite horse at a definite moment is living indefinitely in ‘any environment.’ There is no such thing as ‘any environment’. The definite horse requires a definite environment. We ignore that, though it must be there. I am elaborating an obvious idea. For the idea is obvious, if I have expressed myself with any clearness, though the history of the philosophy of science shows that it is very necessary to elaborate it. The brilliant, and deserved, success of the Aristotelian system of classification has in the past somewhat obscured this essential togetherness of things. 

Classification directs attention to an entity in isolation. The entity is cross-examined as to its predicates, which are its own peculiar property, and is then assigned to its proper genus and species. Thus the pro- cedure of classification ignores the primary consideration of togetherness. Half the difficulties of philosophy result from an exaggerated emphasis on the abstract entity as though it were capable of independent reality. The predicates of an entity are in general merely a one-sided way of expressing its relation to its environment. These predicates belong to the environment just as much as to the entity. For example, the grass is not green apart from its environment: since the light in the environment is required for this greenness. Accordingly classification, by ignoring the environment, has badly misled philosophy.

Classification does not express the origin of science in the very nature of things. The predication of qualities and the resulting classification are very useful and highly technical devices, but they cloak the fundamental idea which lies at the base of science. This idea is that every entity must be studied in its environment; and that this environment has partly a systematic character required by the very essence of the entity, and partly an accidental character, which must be determinate, but which is not determined by the mere consideration of the entity. The togetherness of an entity with the accidental items of its determinate environment is what we mean by the expe- rience of the entity. (By experience I do not mean cognition). The total environment of an entity can be discriminated into a fluent environment of changing parts. The way the entity is connected with the succession of its partial experiences is what we mean by the behaviour of the entity. It is one purpose of science to determine general truths concerning the behaviour of entities as their partial experiences succeed each other. It is another purpose of science to determine the systematic char- acters of the types of togetherness required by various types of entities.

The Process of Realisation.

This togetherness of things takes the form of a process of realisation. Reality is not static: it is a process of becoming. This fluent character of the togetherness of things was already emphasised in Greek philosophy: All things flow, said Heraclitus. Indeed the fact is too obvious to escape notice. But unfortunately things which are too obvious often escape receiving their due emphasis. The result is that there has been a tendency to give an account of reality which omits this essential processional character of the togetherness of things. It is then held that what is processional cannot be real. The fluent togetherness of things is then given a lower place as mere appearance, and we are left with a world in which the appearance which passes is contrasted with the reality in the background, exempt from passage.

This train of metaphysical thought has the unfortunate effect of separating philosophy from science. For science is concerned with our experience of the passage of things in their fluent togetherness. Whereas, on this metaphysical theory, philosophy is concerned with the ultimately real which lies behind the superficialities which lie within the scope of science. 

According to the view which I am putting before you there is nothing behind the veil of the procession of becomingness, though there is much pictured on that veil and essential to it which our dim consciousness does not readily decipher. Indeed the metaphor of a veil of appearance is wholly wrong. Reality is nothing else than the process of becomingness, of which we are dimly conscious. Every detail of the process is open for con- sciousness, though in fact our individual consciousness is only aware of a very small fragment of what is there for knowledge.

Relativity

The process of becoming real is a process of making real the togetherness of things. It follows that there are degrees of reality according to the completeness of realisation of togeth- erness. It is the connections which are realised. In a sense the idea of reality does not apply absolutely to the things thus connected, but only relatively. Thus by reason of the reali- sation of a type of togetherness between A and B, A is real for B and B is real for A. But it is nonsense to speak of A as absolutely real in itself, or of B as absolutely real in itself. A and B are individual existents with a relative reality each for the other. This relative reality of B for A is the becoming of B for A: namely B becomes a reality for A: that is to say, the individual quality of B—what B is in itself—becomes significant for A, and affects the character of A’s experience: thus the Universe is what it is for A because of the realisation for it of B’s individual character. Thus realisation means at bottom the making real of value. 

It is the achievement of valuation, and valuation is a one-sided view of realisation. The process of becoming from the standard-point of A is the breaking in of B’s character upon A. Then A is real because it is a term in this process and so is B. But the true reality is the achieve- ment of this relation between A and B. There are stages of reality and degrees of reality of an entity A, according to the completeness with which A’s individual character has ejected itself into the entities of its environment, and according to the completeness with which A on its side has received the injection of the characters of those entities. A mere absence of any such transfusion of character—value spells nonentity. Every existence is somehow envisaged from the standpoint of reality, and to that extent has some element of reality in its basic individual existence. But, an existent is not fully absorbed into the becomingness of reality unless the realised valuation is reciprocal, so that its mere formal experience has gained a realised significance for it.

This is the doctrine of the complete relativity of reality—at least, it is a doctrine of relativity, expressed from a realist standpoint in philosophy. An entity is not merely abstract by reason of its general requirements of togeth- erness with other entities; this is its formal experience. But in the fluent becomingness of reality, even the intrinsic essence or character of an entity is not for itself alone: it becomes a value for other entities. Otherwise, this transition of individual essence into value for others constitutes the relative character of reality. It is here that contingence arises, and we meet the last problem to which I shall draw your attention in this lecture.

An entity enjoys all the formal experience which its significance requires. This is the basis of the necessity which reigns throughout nature. But its real experience, its experience of the becomingness of value, has for us an air of contingence.

Why are we all here in the exact way we are, immersed in this special realisation of the becomingness of real values? Or to put the matter in a more limited special form, Why have the events of today followed those of yesterday in the exact way in which in fact they have? Why not in other ways? Cannot we discern some ground for the determination of the process?

Science seeks to discover what are the factors in the present which determine the direction of this process of achievement. Now the present reality can be analysed into valuation as display, which is the realisation of the intrinsic charac- ter of the sense-data, such as colour, sound, bodily feelings, and into valuation as directive, i.e., into a distribution of character directive of display. This character distribution is what may be termed the physical field. It is the electromagnetic field of electrons, protons, and the field of activity which they stand for. This directive field is intertwined from the present to the future; so that the present being what it is, the future is thereby determined to be what it will be. Whereas the field of display in the present can be definitely determined as that display in the present without refer- ence to the future. The physical field on the other hand is nothing but the way in which in the present the foundations of the future are being laid. The display in the present can be definitely expressed in terms of the physical field in the pres- ent: but the physical field in the present cannot be adequately analysed except in terms of what it transmits into the future. For example, the theory of the retarded potential exhibits [in] an electron nothing else than a process of transmission into the future.

Thus the display of the present is connected with the display of the future, by means of the connection of the display of the present with the physical field of the present, and the connec- tion of the physical field of the present with the physical field of the future, and the connection of the physical field of the future with the display of the future.

But—and here is one great problem—, is not this physical field a mere myth, based on no knowledge? I do not believe in this mythical theory. It is difficult to understand how the scientific machinery of thought ever arose, if there is no direct discernment of the physical field. It is a clear fact of scientific history that the machinery arose from a gradual making precise of objects which mankind has always imagined itself to have direct immediate knowledge of: I mean chairs, trees, stones, and other objects of perception.

If mankind does in any real sense observe such objects, then the scientific objects merely claim to be merely a more precise rendering of perceptual objects which are somewhat vaguely observed. But if no such perceptual objects are really observed, and if the so-called perceptual objects are merely our ways of recollecting classes of sense-data, then the scientific physical field is based upon no direct knowledge and must be treated as a useful mythical method of expressing somewhat complicated relations which hold directly between sensedata. 

For example, when you see a cricket ball coming swiftly towards you, and you catch it, and it stings your hands, the introduction of the ball is mere myth on this latter theory. There is a dot of colour in the sky approaching you, and this is succeeded by a sort of bumpy feeling, and this by a tingling stinging feeling; these various sense-data having certain definite spatial relations.

This account seems to me to be very unconvincing. If you are a school-boy with an important catch coming your way, it is not the colour you ever think of: it is the object exhibit- ing the colour. These objects are the most insistent things in our experience. They are vague in definition, but insistent for apprehension. You may forget the colour of the ball, but the ball imprints itself on your memory. Why on earth does one worry about the myth? How account for its vividness and universality?

One theory as to the status of the perceptual object—for example, of the cricket ball—is that such an object is merely the class of its appearances. There is a certain flux of sense- data, such as, patches of colour, sensations of touch, and other experiences, all associated with the various locations of the ball. These sense-data—it is said—are all we know of the ball, and are in fact the ball itself when we have added to them the sense-data which might have been observed but which in fact have escaped notice. This is the class-theory of the status of a perceptual object. The theory has been advocated by Bertrand Russell, and was put forward by him in his Lowell Lectures on Our Knowledge of the External World. It is a theory with strong reasons on its side, and I will examine it with more care in subsequent lectures. But I am growing increasingly sceptical of it.

The class theory would make the school-boy, in the agony of catching, have his mind occupied with a class of sense-data such as the redness of the ball when it was a new ball at the beginning of the match. Whereas such a thought never enters into his mind. He is thinking of the ball as a unique entity which is the control of display, but he does not classify the display which in its main outlines is not interesting him.

According to the alternative theory—I mean the control theory—the perceptual object is a persistent character inher- ent in the flux of reality which expresses the selective control by which a definite process is achieved. There is an element of display even in this character, since its individual reality breaks in upon us, and we have a discernment of it. This discernment is insistent and in a sense vivid, yet it is vague. In the endeavor to cure this vagueness science introduces its mole- cules, its atoms, its electrons and its protons. This procedure of science is entirely analogous to the analysis of the total volume of sound in a concert hall into definite notes, and each note into its fundamental tone with its harmonic overtones.

Both lines of thought, the class-theory and the control- theory present great difficulties and secure certain philosophical advantages. I cannot at this final stage of my lecture consider them further.

I will conclude with one reflection. Neither in Science nor in Philosophy, nor in any branch of human achievement do we reach finality. The data of crude evidence upon which Philosophy works is provided by the general state of civilised thought at the epoch in question. In one sense Philosophy does nothing. It merely satisfies the entirely impractical craving to probe and adjust ideas which have been found adequate each in its special sphere of use.

In the same way the ocean tides do nothing. Twice daily they beat upon the cliffs of continents and then retire. But have patience and look deeper; and you find that in the end whole continents of thought have been submerged by philosophic tides, and have been rebuilt in the depths awaiting emergence. The fate of humanity depends upon the ultimate continental faith by which it shapes its action, and this faith is in the end shaped by philosophy.