Heeeeeeeere’s Rowan!
The archbishop of Canterbury has (not for the first time) joined hands with people like Madeleine Bunting by telling the world how despicable reason is.
We understand ‘reason’ as a way of arguing and testing propositions – usually so as to become better at manipulating the world round us. Because religious faith is not a matter of argument in this way, it is then easy to conclude that faith and reason are enemies, or at least operating in different territory.
See that? The way he casually informs us that reason is usually understood as a way ‘to become better at manipulating the world’? It looks as if he’s been studying his feminist epistemology – science and reason are just about raping nature tra la la.
Bernard himself held to an older and richer understanding of reason as the way in which we shared in God’s vision of an ordered and connected world. You could not say that God was rational because he was good at arguing and came to well-supported conclusions: when theologians said that God was rational, they meant that he was consistent with himself and that out of his own understanding of the richness of his being he created a world of astonishing and beautiful diversity which still had a deep consistency about it.
That sounds pretty, as one would expect from an archbishop, but it doesn’t mean anything unless you already think there is someone called ‘God’ who fits that lavish description, and why would you think that?
The traditional Christian account of ‘rationality’ was bound up with becoming properly attuned to the patterns and rhythms of reality, as I put it a moment ago. And for St Bernard and the tradition he represents, the ultimate test of being reasonable was whether you understood what your place was in the universe. A reasonable person would grasp how humanity stood between the angel and the animal, how humanity was called to a very specific way of exercising the mind in relation to the will of God.
So in other words a reasonable person would be thoroughly confused by belief in all kinds of non-existent entities and meaningless concepts and arbitrary rules. So that’s why ‘the traditional Christian account of “rationality'” is such crap and why reasonable people prefer a better one.
“The traditional Christian account of ‘rationality’ was bound up with becoming properly attuned to the patterns and rhythms of reality, as I put it a moment ago. And for St Bernard and the tradition he represents, the ultimate test of being reasonable was whether you understood what your place was in the universe.”
Or, in other words, a reasonable person submits to authority. Even when authority takes your children and makes you work at slave labor. Bollocks to that.
No Rowan, science tells us we are dependent beings, that we are parts of functioning ecosystems and share a common ancestry with all other living things. It tells us we can trace our origins to exploding stars. It tells us we are animals, more skilled at some things and less at others -not better, just different. It tells us ecosystems and their living components would cease to function without variety and redundancy.
These are things never mentioned in the dogmas of Christianity – where in the Nicene Creed does it mention we are parts of ecosystems, we should sustain ecosystem function, or we should consider plants and animals as our kin?
Shucks, aside from the spurious and self-serving nature of dear Rowan’s definition of rationality, there’s a good deal to say against it even on its own terms. For example, when has any Christian conception of God actually been self-consistent? A God who is all about love and such and who simultaneously punishes some people with eternal torture is not “self-consistent” by any conceivable definition of the term. Drop Hell, and you still have self-contradictory nonsense like trinitarianism and resurrection in the body which is somehow all about the soul and not the body and original sin and… well, I don’t have all day.
Alexander Hamilton, a hugely important person to the American Revolution and founding of our government as we now have it, said
“Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.”
I doubt if a reasoning person could “grasp how humanity stood between the angel and the animal..”
Bud
I don’t get it – he doesn’t explain how the big lovable dogs were trained to carry the little barrels of brandy, which is the most important part of the whole St Bernard story. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know squat…
Nice association of science with the negatively laden word “manipulating”. I’d say he’s once again proving that religion is all about manipulating people.
What a disturbing, self-serving, subversive piece of work! Notice how Rowan gives such short shrift to Abelard, as though Bernard has some absolute priority in what even Christians must understand. Notice how reason becomes, not a process of discerning what is or is not true, or well supported by reasons, but a way of “becoming properly attuned to the patterns and rhythms of reality.”
And this is contrasted, then, with “secular thinking,” which is variously characterised in the speech in terms of greed, production and consumption, as though these things are the products of (specifically) secular thinking, not noticing the spectacularly ruinous opulence of English church buildings which, for all their beauty, are memorials to the greed and power of the church.
“But the sober testimony of the twentieth century is that the rationality of secular thinking is no guarantee of universal understanding and reconciliation.” Well, is this the meaning of the testimony of the twentieth century? In what sense was the 20th century the product of secular reason? The First World War, which cascaded in subsequent wars and despotisms of the 20th century, was not the product of secular reason. It was the outcome of an international system in which the churches as well as Islam were intimately, indeed, organically embedded.
The despotic Christianity of the Czars led to the despotisms of Lenin and Stalin, and their successors. Indeed, it was, arguably, the secular reason of the West which brought these religiously inspired totalitarianisms to a end. And the present international tensions are fed far more by religious confrontations than by any amount of secular reason.
It is simply hopeless to consider Marx an emblematic secular thinker. Marx stood Hegel on his head, and Hegel was a central figure in the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment secular rationality. The Romantic absolutism of Marx’s historicism is surely as far from secular reason as Hitler’s resusitation of the holy German Reich, which is probably why, in practice, they are as similar – Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany – as two peas in a pod.
But the real joker is that Rowan doesn’t realise that, in saying that “the response of religious faith should not be to glory in the overthrow of rationality [have they overthrown it, I wonder?] but to reclaim the idea and set it on its ancient foundations once more”, he is walking hand in hand with all the Romantics, since Herder, who thought they were in tune with reality, and sought to impose this vision on others, if necessary, by force.
Put aside everything that he says about God as simply unsubstantiable Christian word-spinning, and Rowan is a great candidate for Führer. Because, if reason is simply attuning oneself to the rhythms and and patterns of reality – notice, this is already something established; it needs no rational demonstration – the only way this is going to happen is by force, unless he thinks he can show that what he is saying is true, that is, by giving reasons, instead of simply swanning around in the space between angels and animals. Start with angels, Rowan: explain!
Sorry, meant to go back and correct ‘resuscitation’. Can’t stop a thought on the downslope.
In background reading for a comment at another site this morning I found this:
“St. Thomas repeatedly defines the act of faith as the assent of the intellect determined by the will (De Veritate, xiv, 1; II-II, Q. ii, a. 1, ad 3; 2, c.; ibid., iv, 1, c., and ad 2). The reason, then, why men cling to certain beliefs more tenaciously than the arguments in their favour would warrant, is to be sought in the will rather than in the intellect. Authorities are to be found on both sides, the intrinsic evidence is not convincing, but something is to be gained by assenting to one view rather than the other, and this appeals to the will, which therefore determines the intellect to assent to the view which promises the most.”
Quite. In short, rationalisation. Conclusions arrived at by ‘the will’, or a wish, masquerading as the end-product of a process of dispassionate and rational thought. But could that possibly be the case for the utterances of an Archbishop of Canterbury?
To argue for a conclusion that reason’s very presence is detectable by certain rationally-based tests, one has to use – reason. The analogy of the other (barrel-bearing) St Bernard is apt: in this case, it’s a bit like a dog chasing its tail.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05752c.htm
http://newmatilda.com/2009/09/23/ferguson-speaks-fluent-denialese
Sounds like Adorno and Horkheimer.
Man alive, I hate those guys. External sense of reason! Gaaah Nazis equal Western civilization! Goobledy goobledy! Abort the Occident, abort, abort!
If I can be crass, religions need us to be dependent or they run out of money and power.
“And this is contrasted, then, with “secular thinking,” which is variously characterised in the speech in terms of greed, production and consumption”
Yeah – that was the Madeleine Bunting bit. What a role model for him to choose! She’s not even an Anglican!
“Can’t stop a thought on the downslope.”
Ha! You too?
Yes, yes, old Rowan is at it again. I don’t bother reading much of what he says because he always simply declaims as self-evidently true things which are simply self-evidently not true.
EG: “A reasonable person would grasp how humanity stood between the angel and the animal, how humanity was called to a very specific way of exercising the mind in relation to the will of God.”
But exactly why would a “reasonable person” grasp these things? What exactly is “reasonable” about these conclusions?
I’m often disturbed by how certain ideas can pose as “radical”, “left wing” notions, but when you actually look at the material reality which they propose, they’re actually reactionary apologetics for the status quo.
Feminist epistemology is an excellent example. They attack logic, reasoning, etc. in the name of feminism. In doing so, they reinforce the false and destructive stereotype that women are incapable of logical thought. Then sexist leaders in the religious establishment latch onto this kind of thinking, exploiting the fact that most religious adherents are female and will perceive the “feminism” in these claims as being pro-woman, when they most certainly are not.
This kind of talk about science “raping” nature is anti-woman, because it characterizes the scientific process as being inherently male. But since it’s couched in the terminology of liberal notions of gender equality, people don’t see it.
“Bernard himself held to an older and richer understanding of reason as the way in which we shared in God’s vision of an ordered and connected world.”
Instrumentalised reason, in other words.
I thought only Marxists claimed God was a product of economics?
“he doesn’t explain how the big lovable dogs were trained to carry the little barrels of brandy”
Jerry Coyne says that gets the Funniest Comment of the Month award. It certainly made me laugh!