The Case against the Atheist Methodology to Knowledge - the Apophatic versus the Reductive, humility versus pride.

 

Just as most regard Eighteenth-century Hume as killing the Enlightenment project by his radical scepticism, so most thinkers would acknowledge Fourteenth- Century William of Ockham’s nominalism was harmful to Western thought.  Hume as a sceptic destroyed his own side so to speak by proving the impossibility of true empirical knowledge.  The Roman Catholic philosopher Ockham struck a terrible blow to metaphysics and the philosophical realism upon which religious faith is founded.

What have we lost as a result of Ockhamite nominalism?  It is understood that universals both in terms of secular classifications and the higher level universals of metaphysical realism are incompatible with the reductionism of nominalism.  When nothing really belongs to a class or species in the earthly realm and metaphysical universals such as love, beauty, goodness and truth are seen as speculative fantasy, access to meaning is cut off.  As humans no longer able to participate in identity (now just an arbitrary classification) or in the higher realm (now imaginary), we are ourselves reduced to mere atomistic individuals devoid of meaning and any telos.

For as long as we exist and think in such a paradigm fundamental beliefs that make full existence possible are inaccessible to us.  Instead religious belief and the spiritual life themselves become arbitrary and blind leaps of faith for each isolated individual.  In the consequent nihilist maelstrom, that must be seen as the final result of the nominalist cancer, meaning can only be achieved by an individual assertion of the will.  That is an underlying connection between arbitrary faith in Protestantism and the arbitrary assertion of purpose in Twentieth Century existentialism. 

Traditional religious faith stood in a different intellectual world, more intellectually rich, far less arbitrary and part of a collective human tradition of thought and spirituality.  It operated according to an ethos of humility.  This humility or recognising what one does not know goes back at least to Socrates and his assertion that true knowledge is that I know nothing.  It was followed through by the apophatic theology of the Church Fathers, in particular Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Saint Gregory of Nyssa.  Centuries later, Nicholas of Cusa would defend a doctrine of ignorance in the face of the hubristic claims of Renaissance Humanist thinkers. 

This humility or recognising our finite minds cannot fully comprehend divine Truth can also be seen at work in the Oecumenical Councils.  Dogma is a word much misused today.  When the Church met in Council it did so on the basis the faith and Christian Truth could not be reduced to a series of assertions.  Rather, all the Church could do was reject the heretical, that which undermined the Truth handed down from God via the Apostles.  So the Councils themselves followed the via negativa of apophatic theology.  For example, we cannot define the mystery of the Incarnation, but the Church was able to assert Arius had fallen into heresy because if Christ were not fully God as well as fully Man, Man could not be fully redeemed.

 What began to go wrong could really only take place after the Great Schism.  With the Pope’s supreme authority on doctrinal matters the Western Church moved towards a more declaratory and propositional theology.  It did not take long for a more propositional and reductive approach to theology to manifest.  Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the same century as the Great Schism, began to make syllogistic arguments for the existence of God.  Most significant was his reduction of the meaning of the crucifixion to satisfaction theology.  Christ died as a payment for our sins to God as a vengeful feudal overlord.  All the nuances and depth of Christian understanding of the crucifixion as part of the Tradition of the Church was lost as individual thinkers began to make theological assertions based on arguments thought up as individual thinkers with finite minds.  Of course the Pope himself would become the authority on dogma over and above the full Tradition.

In such a climate Ockham became possible.  It was his reductionism that we see at work in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and Western atheism.  Indeed atheism in the Western sense is only really possible where a culture has taken a wrong turn into a strange cultural aberration.   Being inside the paradigm we cannot see how pathological and dehumanising it is in reality.  

In the most prosaic and ordinary setting we find Ockham’s reductionism at work:  Ockham’s Razor!  This is the idea that the simplest explanation for the cause is the true explanation.  Of course this can be helpful, but it bears no relation to reality.  Often an effect results because of the coalescing of multiple causes.  Often a more complicated cause is the reason for something happening.  There is a certain logic in avoiding wild speculation, but Ockham’s Razor also prevents us from being able to recognise multi-faceted, higher and more complicated causes.

How has that manifested?  Roman Catholics claim the Pope is the sole authority on doctrine.  The Protestants rely on sola scriptura.  Holy Tradition, as continues in Orthodoxy, takes all into account, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the liturgy itself.  This reductionism has led to a trap for the Western mind, until we became so rationalist that we pulled down our inheritance.  In thought, Rene Descartes declared he would only accept what his finite mind could justify rationally, not recognising that there was a great accumulation of wisdom that his mind would never be able to produce, in politics this collective knowledge was termed the “wisdom of the ancestors” by Burke.   Descartes even attempted in an act of intellectual hubris to “prove” the existence of God through rational argument.  So much for the apophatic theology in the West.

In politics we saw revolution, regicide and sacrilege.  A spirit of prideful rebellion began to plague the West.  A Luciferian animus prevailed and was the ethos behind the secret societies that would foment revolution and atheism.

The reductionist Westerner thought he understood man by stretching his lifeless cadaver out and dismembering his body to see inside.  The most important aspect of the human that animated him, his soul manifested as the person was forgotten and Man was reduced to a machine – the simplest and sole explanation in true Occamite methodology.  Hence the possibility of Darwinism, reducing life to a base cause.

This hubris is fed by the technological power that the scientific method achieves.  This in itself though is Promethean.  It is about power, control and exploitation.  In the end as we see today with A.I. it becomes dehumanising.  Deep thinkers of the contemporary philosophical tradition from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Ellul have written powerfully on the ethical questionability of advancing technology as its takes on a life of its own, enframing us and reducing us.

The fallacy of this reductive spirit is to reduce everything to the lowest explanation so that the most important aspects of the world are invisible to us – the cosmos as a theophany, Man as the Imago Dei, the possibility of participation in the Divine.  We have lost the understanding that life and knowledge are part of a collective tradition within which we make sense of our particular lives.  The very opposite of the Cartesian obsession with individual verification.

In the end, as the Jesuits would say, it all ends in the absurdity as is emphatically demonstrated by the inverted world of today’s West.  Even gender is no longer clear.  The objectivist scientists do not understand they are the reason biological reality is being denied.  You cannot have biology with any meaning without the transcendental.  Gender has a metaphysical aspect.  A woman acts and moves in a feminine way because of her feminine spirit, not just because of the mechanical operation of her biology.

This is all down to a Luciferian rebellious pride.  An assertion of my individual understanding over long tradition.  It means we only understand the most base causes.  We are blind to higher meanings.

The clear absurdity that the scientifically minded who pride themselves on their objectivity are blind to is that they have argued for a random and arbitrary world.  They have an unquestioning faith in the laws of science such as physics, but they have no reality in a random world of chance.  The atheists believe the most simplest explanation of evolution and survival of the fittest can explain love, art, religion.  They do not realise that what their philosophy reduces to mere accidents in our evolutionary story are the highest aspect of life’s meaning and what it is all for – the telos.  Through the human personality, his energies, we can recognise that is the most important part about him and that therefore the most important and highest aspect of existence is the person, or rather Three Persons in harmonious and loving relationship.  Communion and love between persons is the highest point leading to participation in divine energies, not survival of the fittest.  Apply Ockham’s reductive razor though and you are left with the lowest and most trivial explanation.

Neither can the scientist ever overcome his contradictory faith in laws of physics that he can never prove, as David Hume so powerfully demonstrated.  The scientific method can never predict the same rules will apply tomorrow, because he rejects God.  Everything is random and arbitrary.  The ideological scientist is even forbidden by his dogma to posit an Aristotelian Prime Mover, let alone the Person of the Logos as that which holds together the laws of the cosmos, ensuring everything does not disintegrate into chaos.  In contrast the true scientist rather than the adherent to scientism, understands that like the Church Councils he can only say what is not true, he can never fully define what is true.  A spirit of humility applies to true science too.  Quantum physicists are ready to take Platonism seriously.

And so in contrast to the hubristic claims of the humanists, the empiricists, the rationalists we can only return to a full and meaningful life if we adopt an approach of knowing ignorance in humility.  Only if we recognise our limitations and that the full Truth is infinitely larger and higher than we can comprehend will we come anywhere near to Truth. That does not mean we know nothing.  We have the accumulated spiritual experiences that feed into Holy Tradition.  We also have our own personal spiritual encounters that we are able to make sense of within the wisdom of Holy Tradition.  We cannot claim to know it all or assert that what the Church has understood by revelation, by Scripture, by the lives of its saints, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit is irrelevant because my finite mind cannot comprehend it.  Instead in a spirit of humility, recognising our ignorance, we must come home to the Church and its Tradition through personal encounter, which is centred on love.

Liberalism and Disintegration

 

What is meant by liberalism?  In every day language to be liberal means to be open minded and easy going.  In politics there is a link and that link is not necessarily positive.  As G K Chesterton pointed out, one’s mind, like one’s mouth, should on the whole be closed unless receiving something nutritious.  To be open to everything is in a sense to be willing to undergo disintegration.  It is to lose integrity.

The great proponent of open-ness, the French-Jewish philosopher Derrida referred to the Old Testament story of Rahab the whore who aided the Hebrew spies in the taking of Jericho with its supposedly impregnable walls (as pointed out by Jonathan Pageau).   Here we have two key symbols – the whore who loses her integrity of her body for money and the walls, which, when they fall end the integrity of the city.  Derrida promoted a radical open-ness, but for us we can see the fundamental attack upon integrity of  a radical open-ness.

The reactionary Russian thinker Konstantin Leontiev regarded Western liberalism as something like a progressive disease that destroyed the integrity of the body politick.  His use of “progressive” is interesting given its adoption by the most radical wing of liberalism.  If our concern and priority is integrity rather than open-ness, then progressivism does seem to lead to disintegration.

Liberalism’s roots can be found in the disintegration of metaphysics.  With the Franciscan thinkers Duns Scotus and William of Ockham we saw the development of two new ideas that caused a schism with the classical world of thought.  With Duns Scotus we find the development of the “thisness” of things or their haecceity.  What the essence of this new philosophical outlook entailed was that the classical idea of participation  in the metaphysical was lost.  It meant this because Duns Scotus believed that particular things are irreducible and individual (indivisible).  On the face of it that might suggest support for integrity, but the problem is that it works both ways.  In reducing everything to the particular, the integrity of universals is undermined.  By atomising everything it becomes impossible to participate meaningfully in general identities or the transcendental; or at least as the centuries unfolded such a problem was to be revealed.

When the Franciscan Duns Scotus is linked to the other revolutionary Franciscan thinker, William of Ockham, the momentum towards disintegration is further intensified.   With his nominalism Ockham denied the existence of universals.  Forms were merely names given to link disparate things (hence nominalism).

Such a philosophical paradigm can clearly be contrasted with Platonism, with its mystical and otherworldly intellectual forms; but it also breaches withAristotle with his empirically-derived forms and for our purposes, most importantly Aristotle’s telos or the goal towards which all things that exist are oriented (Man’s telos being virtue).

When this reductionist philosophy was applied to the world of Man it eventually became impossible to sustain the idea of the telos – that Man had an overarching purpose that he might fulfil or of which he might fall short.  We can see here the foundations of liberalism, which denies some overarching purpose such as virtue as oppressive and from which we are to be liberated.

Alasdair MacIntyre has identified this lack of telos as the key reason why liberalism cannot give an account of virtue and why liberal societies are falling apart.  It is not surprising that once Western theology and philosophy had taken such a reductionist turn, the philosophy of John Locke became intellectually possible.  The very hierarchy of the State no longer had any claim to universals over the particular.  The anointed Monarch no longer could rely on his participation in the transcendental, but must strike up a contract like a merchant to bring men out of the Lockean ahistorical fiction of a state of nature.

Combined with this disintegration is the influence of England’s religious internecine struggles.  The Protestants saw themselves as being liberated from Rome.  A narrative of liberation fed into popular consciousness and was very compatible with this new ontology of nominalism, where the hierarchies could no longer appeal to universals.

Here we find the moralistic tone of liberalism’s project of demolition.  To destroy general identity and any  chance of participation in higher meaning is narrated as “liberation”.  If we no longer participate in higher meaning or any collective identity then we are free to be the reduced and directionless atoms we really are, driven by our passions.  That in essence is the liberal project.

Contrast that with the more elevated vision of human nature – one that sees us as having a telos and belonging to more general categories.  We are not simply atoms, but are peoples, we participate in religious tradition, we are gendered. 

It is no accident, however uncomfortable classical liberals feel, that the activists at the extreme fringe of liberalism – wrongly termed cultural Marxists – are pushing to dissolve the most fundamental aspects of general human identity, including even gender.  This is simply the narrative of liberation from meaning and belonging being followed through to its nihilistic goal.

What is attacked by liberalism is the integrity of categories and the possibility of participating in higher meaning.  That is not to say any collective identity or means of achieving collective identity is right.  There is a Royal Path between liberalism and the worldly-focused totalitarian agendas (themselves bastard offspring of the Enlightenment).  A cultural and political environment that fosters participation in higher meaning and collective identities is that for which conservatives should strive.

The misleading rhetoric of liberalism suggests that it can provide such an environment, where all can pursue meaning in their own way.  The reality is that liberalism like all ideologies has its own totalising narrative.  The narrative of liberation means that all general and higher identities become categorised as oppressive and as a result must be abolished.  This means that in practice liberalism cannot stop at a compromise between conflicting higher identities, but must wage a campaign against them all.  This is exactly how the Western cultural journey of progressive decline is being played out.  First a collective telos of society, usually religious, is undermined.  In trade, barriers to influx of imports are torn down.  The integrity of the nation state ( once the liberal successor to the conservative empire) is undermined.  Even normative sexuality and then gender are overturned in the name of liberation.  As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin has argued, the final stage of liberation will be from human nature itself and it is likely that such a “liberation” will be played out with technology, artificial intelligence and even, at the risk of sounding melodramatic (which is difficult in a culture where gender is no longer considered a real general category) – the cyborg.

Civic Virtue and the World

Aristotle taught that man’s telos was to achieve virtue.  Just as the purpose of a musical instrument is to be played and thereby produce music, so Man is to live ethically.  Part of that ethical living is to make a commitment to the Polis, the city state, and to devote oneself to public life.  It is ethical to participate in politics.

As Edmund Burke famously pointed out, for evil to triumph good men simply need to do nothing.  If men of virtue do not participate in public life it will become dominated and controlled by the corrupt, the careerist and even the criminal.  In the West after generations of participation, engagement in politics has been decreasing, leaving the field of public life to the cranks and fanatics that our current university system seems intent on churning out of its post-modern system.  Indeed, it seems it is only those driven by vanity as opposed to virtue that have the energy and zeal to enter public life.  

Whether it is fanatics like Corbyn and McDonnell who wish to change the country in a way no normal person could accept or shallow careerists like David Cameron, there seems little room for the man committed to public service as an Aristotlian virtue.  There are two predominant forces in politics today – the ideological leftist extremists and the careerists.

In the United States we have seen a peaceful revolution against this corrupt (in the broadest sense of the word) system.  Donald Trump was elected because there was something rotten in the state of the Western democracy.  A professional and managerial political class committed to its own shibboleths of ideology, well out of step with the consensus of normal people had become isolated in its apparently impregnable position of power.  Donald Trump was elected to change all that – he said the unsayable in an environment of suffocating political correctness.  Paradoxically this New York TV celebrity gave a voice to traditionalist conservatives and Christians deeply troubled by the course the political class had set their nation upon.

It is no cliché to draw a parallel with Brexit.  That other Anglo-Saxon nation, the old country, the United Kingdom went through its own peaceful revolution in the Brexit vote.  Delivering the largest democratic mandate in history the British public voted decisively to leave the international and globalist project that was set up to destroy the nation state and democratic accountability - the European Union.  In England and Wales the vote was emphatically for leave, the figure only being made more marginal by a capital city out of step culturally and politically with England and Wales as a whole.  Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain for specific reasons and should not be considered as having voted against the United Kingdom itself.

Whereas in recent weeks we have seen a significant triumph for the Trump administration, in the exoneration of the President from any suspicion of being complicit with the Russian Government to win the election; in the United Kingdom Brexit has been dealt what is perhaps a fatal blow.  Theresa May will now work across the House of Commons, where there is a majority committed to stopping Brexit.

This tells us much of the decline of British institutions after forty years of being governed by an unelected and foreign bureaucracy.  It is no wonder that when Parliament was merely there to provide a fig leaf for two thirds of laws not democratically processed, the quality of politician and the institution of Parliament itself should have suffered a serious decline.  Our political class is not up to the job of Brexit because it has been enervated and corrupted by the European Union and its corrosive effect on representative democracy.  Participation in politics when ruled by Brussels is a charade and it has attracted those who are happy to play a charade.  Now their bluff is called and they are terrified by the thought of political responsibility and accountability.  What might seem like an opportunity to the public man of integrity is terrifying to the careerist politician.

The corrupt careerists therefore did what comes easiest to them, they lied that they would deliver Brexit while spending three years plotting to subvert the democratic result of the referendum.  This is of course disgraceful, wrong and corrupt.  How should one respond?

Despair or extremism are two very tempting responses.  Our system appears to have shown itself irredeemable.  The public gave Parliament a chance to restore its sovereignty and it preferred vassalage.  Yet neither anger nor despair are responses that one striving for virtue should countenance.

There is the so-called Benedict option  If we look at the betrayal of Brexit not in isolation but as symptomatic of the decline of Western politics, then rather than despair should we not be liberated from placing any hope in temporal victories?    One could then withdraw from the world not in despair, but in a spirit of devotion and hope for the next world.  It is interesting to note that Aristotle himself placed the life of contemplation at an even higher level of attainment in virtue than civic participation.

If we are thinking in typological terms, then an analogy might be drawn between a Brussels-administered United Kingdom and First-Century Judea, with its charade of independence, while de facto power was very much in the hands of the Roman administration.

There was a political movement in Judea, the Zealots, who sought for a political victory over Rome.  They were disappointed in a corrupt Jewish establishment that had come to terms with Rome.  These zealots were also to be deeply disappointed in Christ, because they had hoped for a Messiah who would overturn the oppressors and bring about a political Utopia in the form of a new Davidic Zion, powerful and flourishing.  Yet as Christ taught, His kingdom is not of this world.

The temptation to zealotry in today’s circumstances would be to slip into a revolutionary mindset, perhaps even looking at a violent solution to the political corruption and lack of national sovereignty revealed by the Brexit betrayal.  Such an extremist Brexiteer zealotry is not the answer.

Yet again just as despair and extremism are temptations that should be resisted, abdication of responsibility is not an answer either.  We are in the world at the moment that we should be, with all the responsibilities that entail to act or not.  We cannot entirely disengage from this disappointing and fallen world, but neither can we place the totality of our hope in it.
 

Christian civilization is under attack in subtle ways, for the serpent is the subtlest creature in the garden.  Whether it is the attack on gender as a reality or national identity or marriage, forces have combined to destroy the foundations of our culture.  Brexit is just one example of this attack on all that gives meaning, in that national identity has to be dissolved if the post-modern agenda is to succeed. 

The point is not to give in to despair, but to continue the good fight, with an expectation of all being put right eschatologically.  With the specific example of Brexit our nation shook and destabilised the foundations of the new establishment’s new Tower of Babel.  It is right to continue shaking it, without believing we can replace it with a perfect state ourselves.  If we were to do that we fall into the very heresy of chiliasm that lies behind the concept of the European Union.    There will never be an ultimate political solution to this world, but it is right to strive against corruption and duplicity and attacks on our core values.