2. WHO'S AFRAID OF RATIONALISM?

An astute reader has asked whether the first post was rationalistic.  Since Orthodox thinkers have in our day begun to take a critical view of Western trends like rationalism, this is a good question to ask. 

We begin with rationality.  I define rational as providing evidence.  Suppose that someone asks me why I am heading to the gas station, and I reply that the car is nearly on empty.  My decision is rational because I gave evidence for it.  This, naturally, does not guarantee that I am right—perhaps the fuel gauge is broken and the car does not need more gas.   

If we look at this example carefully, we can see that I pull over because of information provided objectively by the real world (the fuel gauge, the engine etc.) and subjectively by reason (my knowledge that the engine cannot function without gas, my knowledge that the fuel gauge indicates how much gas is left etc.). 

The fact that I am rational depends upon my ability to successfully take in real-world experiences and draw to appropriate conclusions about them.  I cannot stop taking in real-world experiences or drawing to conclusions about them.

Suppose now that I ignore the fuel gauge or deny its significance.  In order to do this, I also have to ignore the engine.  Where do I get the information which will help me finish my trip?  If I have just shut out the part of the world that alone can give me useful data, I can draw on irrelevant information (things happening outside the car windows) or imagination; either way, I am avoiding just that information that is most helpful to finishing my trip. 

Now we can corner rationalism.  In our simile, revelation is the engine and its fuel gauge and finishing the trip is salvation.  The rationalist simply denies revelation and uses his fertile imagination together with irrelevant information to produce thoughts which take its place.  His imagination in effect becomes his revelation. 

We may now look at a few examples of how this works.

When St. Athanasius introduced homoousios¹ into the theological vocabulary, he was using a non-Biblical term to clarify a dogma of the faith.  He did not dismiss the Bible or his religious experience, nor did he add new content to the faith.  Therefore, his procedure, as electrifying as it was at the time, does not qualify as rationalism.

When Locke says that “no proposition can be received for divine revelation . . . if it be contradictory to our clear, intuitive knowledge,”² he qualifies as a rationalist. 

What about Aquinas?  Here I have to reveal that my reader was moved by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick’s censure of Aquinas.³  

My guess is that Aquinas is not a rationalist.  Because Aquinas’ output is so prodigious, I cannot swear to it.  A single quote can hardly do him justice, yet a quote that comes in the first article of the Summa—on sacred doctrine—is virtually the author’s pledge for his subsequent conduct.  “It was necessary for human salvation,” he writes, “that there should be knowledge that accords with divine revelation.”  Then he says that those things “which are made known through divine revelation exceed human reason.”⁴ 

These lines make three things clear.  First, that reason is not necessary for human salvation in the same way that divine revelation is.  Second, that our knowledge of doctrine depends on divine revelation.  Third, that divine revelation cannot possibly be answerable to human reason. 

Therefore, it seems unlikely that Aquinas is a rationalist.  He may be guilty of other errors—such as predestination—but his statement of the anti-rationalist position is as clear as we could ask.   

In short, providing evidence is rational.  Making revelation a defendant in the court of reason is rationalistic.  In the Orthodox view, reason is a footman in the temple of revelation.⁵

  

ENDNOTES

1.  Homoousios (of one essence) is a term introduced by St. Athanasius to counter the heretical views of Arius and others, who taught that Christ was not truly God (“There was [a time] when he was not”).  The Orthodox view is that Christ is begotten but equally beginningless.  For details, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition:  A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1971; repr., 1975), vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), 200-210.

2.  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Clarendon:  Oxford University Press, 1975), 692. 

3.   Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy:  Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape, 2nd ed. (Chesterton, Indiana:  Ancient Faith Publishing:  2017), 57.  I urge every reader to buy this book and read it. 

4.  Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 1, a. 1.

5.  St. Paisius the Athonite provides a practical overview of rationalism and reason in With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man (Souroti, Thessaloniki, Greece:  Holy Monastery Evangelist John the Theologian, 2011), 252-266.