[Rushdoony] Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we give thanks unto Thee for the certainty of Thy government. We thank Thee that the government is upon Thy shoulders, who doest all things well. And so in this confidence we come to Thee, knowing that the things that are are of Thee. Knowing, our Father, that in all things Thou dost rule and overrule in the affairs of men and that we can move and the assurance that all our down-sittings and all our up-risings are known to Thee. That thou dost make all things work together for good to them that love Thee, to them who are the called according to Thy purpose, so that in all things, we are indeed more than conquerors. How great Thou art, O Lord, and we praise Thee. In Jesus name, Amen.
Our subject today is faith and knowledge. It is obvious from what we have thus far said, that all epistemology, every theory of knowledge, has a metaphysical basis. That is, it rests on a concept of being. And also on pre-theoretical faith, with respect to ultimacy. Man begins with an act of faith and he reasons out of faith. The unregenerate begin with an act of faith that God is not. The believer begins with the faith that God is. Now the primacy of faith is stressed in Scripture, it was developed by some of the church fathers, notably Tertullian and Augustine. It was very clearly set forth by Saint Anselm. Anselm, one of the great thinkers of the church, his dates are 1033 to 1109. He was called by many, and with justice, the second Augustine. Now Anselm, in his Proslogion, dealt with the problem of knowledge, beginning with the knowledge of God. He was very keenly aware of {?} philosophy, of the problems that we have been dealing with this week. Granted, he did not have the bandage of the modern man to see the dead end which modern philosophy has worked itself into. But Anselm, despite this, was aware that if man begins on the premise of himself as ultimate, he will reason himself into a corner. And so at the beginning of his Proslogion, which is a very weighty, philosophical study, he states the case devotionally, in a very moving number of paragraphs which are written almost as a prayer to God. And so he says, and I quote, with regard to his predicament as he tried to know God by reason, “Lord, if Thou art not here, where shall I seek Thee, being absent? But if Thou art everywhere, why do I not see Thee present? Truly Thou dwellest in unapproachable light. But where is unapproachable light, or how shall I come to it? Or who shall lead me to that light and into it, that I may see Thee in it? Again, by what marks, under what form, shall I see Thee? I have never seen Thee, O Lord, my God; I do not know Thy form. What, O most high Lord, shall this man do, an exile far from Thee? What shall Thy servant do, anxious in his love of Thee, and cast outafar from Thy face? He pants to see Thee, and Thy face is too far from him. He longs to come to Thee, and Thy dwelling-place is inaccessible. He is eager to find Thee, and knows not Thy place. He desires to seek Thee, and does not know Thy face. Lord, Thou art my God, Thou art my Lord, and never have I seen Thee. It is Thou that hast made me, and hast made me anew, and hast bestowed upon me all the blessing I enjoy; and not yet do I know Thee. Finally, I was created to see Thee, and not yet have I done that for which I was made.”
Anselm confesses that his mind had led him nowhere. He had tried to face the world with what Lenin later called “naïve realism”, he had tried to face it with Aristotelian realist. He had tried to face it neo-Platonically. But he found that he was only in contradiction. And so he turned his back on the whole premise of the Greek tradition in philosophy; on autonomous man, on autonomous reason, and sought his premise instead in Scripture. He rejected the attempt to understand that I may believe. Now this is the premise of non-Reformed religious philosophy. This is the philosophy of {?}; I will understand in order that I may believe, I will know that I might have faith. But Anselm said instead, and I quote, “I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate Thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree Thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand Thee that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand. For this also I believe—that unless I believed, I should not understand.” Unquote. Now out of this you get the Reformation. This is the starting point of Calvin. This is the starting point of Van Till, that you begin on the premise of God and His Word. You believe in order to understand, and you believe that unless you believe, you will not understand. Let me add parenthetically that the doctrine of the atonement had its great classical and clearest statement also in Anselm’s study, Cur Deus Homo. Why did God become man? So that Protestantism holds, without reservation, in its Reformed and also where Lutheranism is orthodox forms to the formulation of Saint Anselm. He, above all others, clearly set forth the doctrine of the atonement. That’s parenthetical to give you a little more insight into the man.
Now David declares in Psalm 36:9, “For with Thee is the fountain of life. In Thy light shall we see light.” As against this, the principle of Helenic philosophy was in effect, in our light we shall see thee, O God, if thou dost exist. Unfortunately, after Abel, after Abelard, yes, medieval philosophy decided against Anselm. He became the forgotten man until the Reformation. And the principle of Abelard was I understand in order that I may believe. Now the conflict between these two positions, I am going to understand by my autonomous reason in order that I may believe, that faith comes through reason, as against the principle that we believe in order that we may understand. The conflict between these two principles goes right back to the early Church. As Greeks and Romans were brought into the Church, unfortunately very very often they brought some of their pagan presuppositions into the Church with them. We’re going to spend a few minutes analyzing the pagan premises of one of these men, a remarkable man in some ways, a man who died for the faith, but a man who sometimes made such amazing statements that you marveled that uh, he called himself by the name of Christ; Justin Martyr. J-U-S-T-I-N, Justin Martyr, whose dates are 110 to 165. So he comes very very early in the history of the Church. Now Justin Martyr, whenever he began to reason, and he wrote a number of books to defend the faith, he was one of the first men in the area of apologetics, and in the area of epistemology within the Christian tradition. Unfortunately, thought not as a Christian, but as a Greek. He assumed the monistic premise of Greek philosophy concerning one common being, thus, as Christians we believe as we’ve seen that there are two kinds of beings, created being (the whole universe as created by God) and the uncreated being of God, and that the two cannot be used, uh, confused, that man is always man, he never graduates to become a god as in Greek thought, Egyptian thought, Roman thought, and so on, where you find monism implicit; one kind of being. Now the monism was not fully developed, this is by the way that it was dialectical, but there was an implicit monism. We won’t go into that now because that involves us in some other very difficult areas of philosophy.
But for Justin Martyr, there was just being; one kind of being, and there was a great ladder of being. Now the phrase the ladder of being is not used in Justin Martyr to my recollection, but it’s a common expression that is used in his whole philosophy and especially in the 18th century, came to sum up the whole of this position. Now, the ladder of being idea holds that everything from the lowest atom to God are of one substance, and God is at the top of the ladder, the highest, and man is here, and some of the higher animals are here, until you get down here to the lowest atom. All of these things then have something in common. And you have a common ground between them because they have a common being. They all have, to some degree, on the lower end of the scale, matter (this is where the dialecticism comes in), but the higher up they get the more they are pure spirit. But implicit in all of this, and more explicit up here is reason, mind, or logos. Now, Justin Martyr was brought into the Church out of the Greek world, believing this and not yet fully grasping this. So while theologically he affirmed God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, this was what he was really still believing in. And as a result, he identifying the logos, the reason of Socrates, as Jesus Christ, and assumed a common framework of reference. Thus he took John 1:9, Jesus was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, and read it in terms of this, rather than in terms of this. And he went on to say, and I quote, “We have been taught that Christ is the firstborn of God. And we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; (So that all men have a part of Christ, or are partakers of Him insofar as they have reason) and those who lived reasonably are Christians (Now that’s an amazing statement, isn’t it? As long as you are somewhere up here; you have logos in you, therefore Christ, and the more reasonable you are the more you prove you’re a Christian even though you did not know Christ) those who lived reasonably are Christians even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham (He’s talking like a Greek, you see, Greeks and barbarians? So now, though he’s a covenant man he’s not saying my forefather Abraham, as a Christian should; barbarians) Abraham and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious. So that even they who lived before Christ, and lived without reason, were wicked and hostile to Christ, and slew those who lived reasonably.”
So if you were an unreasonable man, you’re anti-Christian, and if you were a great champion of reason you were a Christian in the world without Christ. Well, when we pursue the logic of that, it means that Aristotle was probably a better Christian than say Saint Paul, because Aristotle was more faithful to the premises of autonomous reason. It puts Justin Martyr in a very difficult position. He’s cited the philosophers and stoics as Christians and said they were Christians without knowing it, and he was winding up with another doctrine of salvation. For the Greek tradition, or an aspect of the Greek tradition, salvation meant identification with reason, the life of reason. In the neo-Platonic tradition, it meant absorption into the eternal idea or reason. Now, for Scripture of course. Salvation is not a transition from unreason to reason, but from sin on the one side of the wrath of God, and the grace of God, through the atoning power of Jesus Christ. So you can see what another world Justin Martyr is presenting to us, not the world of grace, but the world of reason as savior. Not the historical Jesus, but the idea of Jesus as ultimate mind, logos, or reason. Of course you get two different views of knowledge from these two positions. For the one, this and that of Justin Martyr, man has the same mind and reason which is the property of God to apply to an alien world, and the result is a dialectical philosophy, mind versus matter, or {?} down into monism or possibly dualism, and it has a problem of the one and the many. This is a very important problem, if you’re interested in it, my book The One and the Many, deals with it.
The indifference of Helenic and Roman philosophy to epistemology and metaphysics came about because of their despair of any solution. Justin Martyr began thus with the nameless being, all of which is God, the whole matter is God, although God is also the fullness of it. And as a result, he very definitely introduced into the Church the alien premise which led to Roman Catholic theology and philosophy. Conflict, thus, was brought into the Church from the very beginning. However, with Anselm and Aquinas, you have a polarization, these two people represent the two different premises, so that within the Church, conflict was now sharpened to the breaking point. Two traditions, the tradition of Aquinas led to the counter-Reformation, it led to Arminiasts, to modernism, to the whole of what today rules the churches. Whereas, of course, that of Anselm led to Calvin, to the Reformed faith. Of course, in this tradition of Aquinas, we have to put also the philosophers we began with in the first hour, Descartes, Berkley, Hume, Kant, and others. The tradition of Aquinas led, by the Middle Ages, to the breakdown of medieval society and to despair and hopelessness. It is interesting that you had the same despair of knowledge, you had at the end of the Middle Ages, just as you did in the last days of Greek civilization when you had the cynics and the stoics, a large dropout of {?} population. The cynics are very interesting, because the word cynic comes from kynos, which we have today as canine; dog. And the whole proposition of the cynic philosophers, of Greece and of Rome, was that the idea of man claiming to be something more than the animals, and to live in a world of moral values is nonsense, he’s a another dog, another animal. And so they called themselves cynics, they were going to prove that man was no better than the dogs. So they copulated openly in the streets. Now, it’s interesting that one of the first demands in the free speech movement at Berkley by the student revolution was a demand to have the same freedom on the campus as the dogs, to copulate openly. They have the same premises as the cynics of old, that man was nothing more than an animal, that we have no reality around us that we can vouch for, that there is no God, no meaning, no purpose.
As a result, the cynics lived like the hippies have, hand to mouth existence, they refuse to bother with their appearances, or to get a haircut, or to observe any social forms, they express their contempt of everything. We are told of one of them, Diogenes, that he lived just anywhere, in a barrel or slept against a doorway, and stated at one time (The idea, by the way, of Diogenes looking for an honest man with a ladder was that there was no such thing as honesty, so hunt high and low, all over the world, moral values do not exist) He also said that it was a shame to bury dead people, because it’s a waste of good meat. He was out to shock, and the whole premise of his shock was to convey the idea to people that there were no moral values, no meaning, life is meaningless, there is no real world out there, there is nothing. Now at the end of the Middle Ages, again, because autonomous man with his autonomous reason was unable to accomplish anything, the tradition of Aquinas and Scholasticism led to this same despair, and you had again your hippie youth.
[Please turn over the cassette at this point]
[Rushdoony] The tradition of Aquinas and Scholasticism led to this same despair, and you had again your hippie youth. The goliards, they were professional students who wandered from campus to campus, only when it was absolutely necessary did they actually register for a course and take it, most of the time they were a disturbing element on campus. They had the equivalent of a stringed instrument, of the modern guitar, they had quite a tradition of songs they sang, like our present day rock music, although I’d say theirs was better, and we have the words to a great many of their songs, the essence of which is; there is no God, there is no meaning, there is no truth, so live it up fellows, great, enjoy yourself, you’re soon dead, and that’s it. It was cynicism, it was skepticism. And this was the kind of movement that was governing the university scene when Luther came on the scene, this deeply embedded, profound cynicism and skepticism. And of course, now I don’t have to go into it, you have seen the past ten, fifteen years dominated by the same kind of cynicism on the academic scene, among the younger generation. Again, as a result of the disillusionment of the possibility of knowledge, a despair of the possibility of meaning in the world, so that again you have skepticism. And of course this is not surprising. When the profoundest men of an era themselves are skeptical to the core, why shouldn’t the student be?
For example, Einstein in his Essays in Science said with regard to epistemology, and I quote “Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts form experience and ends with it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality.” Unquote. Einstein was a mathematician, and he was saying that all mathematics, because it’s a product of logic has no relationship to the world around us. In my head, two plus two equals four, but it has nothing to do with the real world. It’s no different from saying “mairzy doats and dozy doats and little lambsy divey”, a little nursery song that was a popular song in the 30’s. It’s just an expression, and instead of writing nursery rhymes, I, Einstein, express myself in terms of logical constructions that are called mathematics. Moreover, he says that experiences are so mixed with concepts, even our experiences are never simply experiences, rather, they are intellectual conventions. So that we cannot say that we have any knowledge of reality. And so he said this is true even with regard to the idea of causality, which is so important to science. So he said, and I quote, this is from Sidelights of Relativity, “At this point an enigma presents itself which in all ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things?” Unquote. So this is a peculiar thing, I think of things like two plus two equals four, or some more sophisticated level, which I won’t try to reproduce because I can’t. I’ve read his Theory of Relativity and when I finished I knew less than when I began, and I am not kidding when I say that, I was more confused when I finished than when I started. Now, he said somehow pure mathematics has a relationship to reality, had he lived he could have said, well we were able to put a man on the moon with it, that’s pretty precise isn’t it, the correlation. But how can it be, because that by definition is a world without meaning, without any causality, without any rhyme nor reason, and we don’t even know it’s out there, our minds, locked up inside of our skulls cannot depend on our sense impression, because by definition there is no pattern, no law, no order in that world that would lead to God you see, so we can’t admit that.
And yet, when Reichenbach once in conversation, asked him how did he arrive at the concept of his theory, the basic premise. Einstein gave an off the cuff answer which was very revelatory. He said it was because of his strong conviction of the harmony of the universe. In other words, it was a world that God had made, it had an order in it, even though philosophically he would not admit it. So his operating premise was that it was a world such as Scripture says God made it. And yet his philosophical premise was that there was no relationship between the mathematics he had in his head and reality. Thus the issue is not one side the Christian side begins with faith and the other with reason, all begin with faith, the question is which faith? As Christians, we are not hostile to reason as reason, we are hostile to reason as god. We believe in order that we may understand, God is God, and we acknowledge God, our reason can function. But when our reason tried to play god it breaks down. You’re putting it to a task it is not competent to, so that over and over again, whenever reason has tried to play god it has broken down. Our faith is in God, they begin with an act of faith in the autonomous mind of man. Our point of departure is the sovereign God of Scripture. Thus the natural man has a problem; on the one side mind and logic, on the other side brute factuality; total meaninglessness. But along came Bergson who wanted to establish reason even more, and with Bergson here was mind; the “I”, and here was factuality; brute facts. But by the time Bergson got through, he didn’t even know if he could know the “I”. So, it’s very difficult to understand man more suicidal than that, because first you say you have nothing but meaningless factuality here, but here you have at least logic, mind; a universe of meaning, but it’s all locked up in the mind of man, and Bergson said (B-E-R-G-S-O-N), a French philosopher of the early part of this century. We do not even have knowledge of the inner self, how is it possible?
We saw earlier that in Descartes, man was pure thinking substance, in Darwin he was an animal, in Freud he became a very poor animal, a very sorry one. Because Freud came along, accepted all this, and carried it a little further, and then he made a man; a very, very sorry being, in that he said, instead of reason being important in man, there are three aspects of man’s nature, the id, the ego, and the super-ego. Of these, the super-ego is the least important. The super-ego is the superficial element is what the parents, and the church, and the school, and the society teach a person. It’s what he picked up from the outside. The id is the pleasure principle, it’s a key fundamental thing in man. And the basic urge of the id is to gratify oneself totally, and it’s the id that basically governs man. The three basic drives of the id are cannibalism; to kill the father because he has the picture of the primordial pack; man as an animal, and the father driving out the son {?} the mother and the daughters. And so he says, the three basic instincts in man that are a part of his will to live are: cannibalism, to eat the father which involves also parricide (to kill the father), and incest. This is the will to live. Not a very pretty picture of man, but this is basic to modern psychiatry to a very great degree. The ego is the reality principle. And the ego says that these deep primitive urges in man which are rooted in millions of years know that no, you can’t do that or you will get in trouble. And so the reality principle is the will to death. (You’ll find more of this in my book on Freud)
So, man is caught between a will to live, which moves him to do things which lead only to trouble, which are impossible to the modern world, and the reality principle, which is the will to death. And so he says, man is doomed, there is no hope for man. But this is not all, Darwin, who preceded Freud, shared the same hopeless skepticism. You see there’s no place for reason in this; reason is a facade, it’s a joke, it’s a pretension. Because {?} reason the id and the ego rule. And Darwin had this to say of reason, when someone wrote him a letter, and asked him concerning the possibility of knowledge. Charles Darwin’s answer to Graham in a letter of July 3rd, 1881 was this. {?} said is the universe a result of chance? Can we know anything about it? Is knowledge possible, or is it impossible? And Darwin answered, and I quote, “You have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” Unquote. In other words, I wouldn’t put any stock in a monkey’s mind, and since I’m only a monkey a little further along the line, what reason is there to think that I have any knowledge about anything? Is it any wonder that man is despairing of knowledge? I mentioned earlier and said I would tell you a little more about Gunther Stent.
Gunther Stent, S-T-E-N-T, has written a book which you would find an interesting read. The title of the book, published in 1970 I believe, ’69 or ’70, is (I believe the, yes) The Coming of the Golden Age; a view of the end of progress. Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age; a view of the end of progress, published by the National History Press in 1969. Now, Gunther Stent in this book writing as a molecular biologist, University of California, used a very grim picture, he says we have lost any possibility of knowledge. We thought once we got rid of God (And he’s writing this as an unbeliever) we would have a golden age, we would be free of all those superstitions and the Bible, and so on (He doesn’t specify, he just sweeps them out, a few phrases) man would now be free, that’s the net result. But what has happened? We have entered into the worst kind of slavery possible. We no longer have any way of differentiating, since we don’t have God, between good and bad, right and wrong. So what do we get? He says, why music, we’ve got John Cage. John Cage, who goes out and with a tape recorder, tapes a lot of random sounds and gets several tape recorders up there and this is his symphony, he’s playing a lot of random screeches and howls. Or, throws a lot of notes onto a page, or a number of pages, you play these random notes and that’s a symphony. Or he said, you’ve got artists who sit back and throw paint at a canvas, or get some squirting guns and shoot paint at the canvas, and they think this is a painting. Or writers who just throw a lot of words together and they say this is a poem. And he said we have no way of saying, look that’s no good, because we’ve destroyed the possibility of saying there’s a difference. There is a good and a bad, a right and a wrong. And so, he says, the consequences for science are devastating, we no longer are getting young graduate students who are going to go on to the higher and more complicated fields of sciences, and here’s Berkley graduate, professor, graduate school professor writing, we’re no longer getting them with the same zeal for knowledge because who believes that knowledge is possible in our world? Men are governed, he said, by the pleasure principle. And so, he says, the graduates we are getting now are mostly doing it for the same reason that someone collects stamps, or someone else collects cigar bands, or matchbooks, it just appeals to them, they’re doing their thing. Now how long, he raises the question, are we going to have science when knowledge has no meaning? And so, he says, I foresee the death of science, that given a couple of centuries or more, we are going to see a man becoming like the Polynesians everywhere in the world, degenerate, pleasure-loving, worthless, and man-kind will fade away.
Now it was very interesting, I think it was March of 1970, that the Natural History magazine, either March of ’69 or ’70, had about a four page review of Dr. Stent’s book. A very favorable review, except that the reviewer concluded, I cannot buy Dr. Stent’s optimism, it won’t take that long before civilization is gone. Now, this is the consequences of a non-Christian epistemology. It leads man into the blind alley of having no knowledge, no possibility of knowledge, and turning his back on reality and living in terms of pleasure, but it’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, and die they shall. But we who are the living in Christ, have a world to conquer and to rebuild, the times require a Christian epistemology. Are there any questions now? Yes?
[Audience member] {?}
[Rushdoony] The Natural History Press, Garden City, New York. 1969. Yes?
[Audience member] {?} Anselm had when he {?}, would you say that this is a {?}
[Rushdoony] Yes, now his ontological argument is not based on an attempt to prove God, but believing in God, you then show how in terms of your faith, he is an inescapable idea. So, the trouble with many people is that they approach Anselm’s argument as though argument is trying to, the argument is an attempt to prove God, rather it’s an argument from man who says, I believe in God, therefore I’m going to demonstrate how, you cannot think, he said, in terms of degrees, without having a premise. You have something up here from which all degrees emanate, you see. So that the idea of degrees presupposes a higher and a lower he says, and then he proceeds to develop his ontological argument. But, it is not to convince people that there is a God, but because they believe in God, to demonstrate to them what it means to say that God is. So it’s not strictly a proof. Now subsequently, people because they approached Anselm from the position of Aquinas, have tried to see his argument as a proof of God. But he says, I believe in order that I may understand.
[Audience member] This was {?}
[Rushdoony] Oh no, it goes back to Tertullian, yes. And Tertullian and Augustine of course took it from Scripture. It was the premise, the just shall live by faith, and by live meant they shall reason, they shall walk, they shall do everything, from the fundamental premise of faith. Are there any other questions? We have just a very brief time. You’ll find, those of you who are interested, Anselm is very worthwhile to work in, he is not easy reading, although he is very beautiful reading, he’s a highly concentrated writer. The bulk of his works in this area fill just a small volume, but they’re concentrated writing. He has an argument which is very beautiful, which in a sense anticipates Sartre, and that he says because God has being he has essence, and so there is an essence to things inescapably. So that you could say, here are two men, Sartre and Barth, who are at opposite ends, and they see the issues very clearly from totally divergent perspectives. Any other questions? Well, if not, we’re through just a little early. Does someone know how to turn this off?