The Madness of Rationalism

Rationalism is a human quality distinguishing Man from the dumb beasts.  Man is the rational animal, as Aristotle put it.  Until the advent of post-modernism, rationalism had been seen since the Enlightenment and before as the unique and special quality of Man, at least in the West.  The Jacobins after the Revolution paraded an idol of Madam Reason through the streets, to supplant and usurp the Mother of God.

In the Lenten calendar, prior to the Laudation of the Mother of God, at the Akathist to the Mother of God a familiar Orthodox phrase is recited - 

"Rejoice fold of rational sheep!"

The Christian worshippers form a fold of rational sheep in the Church.  Why rational?  Well they are worshipping the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, the fount of the rational.  Importantly this is rationality not detached from the eternal Logos, but participating in worship of the divine Logos.  Through worship we become rational actors in life, working to the telos of our nature and participating in the energies of the Divine.  We overcome the irrational forces of chaos.

Indeed it seems something of a paradox, but the life of the Church, dismissed by the modern post-Enlightenment rationalist as obscurantist turns out to be the source of the rational life.  This is not the reductive rationalism of discursive reason, leading to the scepticism of Hume and the nihilism of Nietzsche and Sartre.  The contrasting rationalism of the Encyclopeadists is rooted in human hubris and from its very root was bound to deform into the subversiveness of atheism and finally the upside-down world of post-modernism.

It is through the mystics and ascetics of the Church that we learn how to live rational and ordered lives.  Right back to the days of  Saint Symeon the Stylites, the extreme ascetic of the Church did not condemn the world as evil, but acted as an arbitrator in worldly disputes when petitioned to pause his prayer on his pillar by parties to disputes.  Symeon of Stylites, imposing extreme asceticism upon himself was famous for his moderate and well-judged guidance to his fellow Syrian Christians.

Even more extreme we find the example of the fool for Christ who through his crazy breaches of social convention restores the city to a Christian life along the golden mean of moderation and away from extreme heresies.  Another Saint Symeon, Symeon the holy fool of Emesa, a fool for Christ, disrupted church services, caused general chaos in Emesa, even running through the ladies' communal baths naked, but all to restore the city to a Christian civic and personal life - whereby the extremes of hypocrisy, sin and heresy were moderated by his strange witness.

After the Laudation of the Mother of God comes the fifth Sunday of Lent and the commemoration of Saint Mary of Egypt.  An exemplar of asceticism, after a life of whoredom and promiscuity, Mary spent 47 years in the Jordanian desert living on roots in an extreme ascecis.  And yet this seemingly crazy life was a restoration of her soul to the fold of rational sheep, to such an exemplary degree that she walked on water.

The paradox is that those saints who live mystical and ascetic lives help us to live rationally and moderately.   This is true rationalism because it is rooted in humility.  By contrast what has passed for rational thinking in the West is instead rooted in a Babel-like spirit of Hubris.  The rationalism lauded today is from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge by prideful grasping, not awaiting the right moment.

Because of this and its denial of any hierarchy of beings or knowledge, it is by definition reductive.  The ratio becomes a zero.  It is not participation in higher meaning or being filled by the divine Logos.

In the reductive and discursive reasoning of deduction and induction, without any participation through the nous (that vital and neglected faculty) in the energies of the divine, there is only an ever-reducing circle to a point of zero or nil - nihilism results through a radical scepticism.

It is a type of knowledge and illumination of a Luciferian kind.  It is the enlightenment by Lucifer, but the refusal to enter into the divine darkness following Moses and Saint Gregory of Nyssa up Mount Sinai.  It leads to the continual prideful rebuilding of Babel - revolutionary France, Bolshevism, the New World Order and the Great Reset.  Such rationalism lies behind the approach to artificial intelligence and singularity of living for ever in a temporal and mortal existence.

For all its rationalism it is a type of madness.  G K Chesterton's description of the mad man comes to mind:

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

What can be drawn from this is that on the one hand we have the paradox of the mystical ascetic guiding us to rational moderation and on the other the reductive rationalist leads us to madness.  Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the story of the modern West.  Post-modern subversion is not the adversary, but the offspring of the Enlightenment.  Rationalism turned the philosophers mad by leading them into a radical scepticism, nihilism and finally the post-modernism of Derrida, Deleuze and the Frankfurt School.  And now the rest of the world looks on at the crazy chaos of modern Western culture that is destroying us for all our wealth, technological progress and indeed our rationalism.