In the age of “science”, while the continental clerisy were delighting in knowing nothing except ideas in the mind, the British were revelling in knowing nothing except mental impressions made by the senses. To make sense of this Britannic intellectual inclination, we need to step back and consider the stage on which it unfolds.
Francis Bacon, who provides empiricism its methodology, like Descartes, had read Montaigne. The great French essayist had captured the au courant scepticism regarding the methodologies of the past, and the ennui emanating from the priority traditionally given to things religious. In many ways his considerations anticipate the modern ideas that will be espoused in utilitarianism and personalism. Truth, for him, resides in discovering the use and usefulness of things, in establishing a living familiarity with things. God is Life, and nature is the poem telling of his existence. The truth of the self, of the soul, of life, is found not in “system of truths”, be they revealed, inferred, or deducted, but only in living, in encounter and experience. We do not possess life, it possess us. Thus, its primitive stirrings in intuition and inspiration, the openness for the unexpected, for the contingency of existence—these move man to the appreciation and rightful usage of knowledge, to proper and moral conduct. This élan for being human stands contrary to the propensity of both rationalists and empiricists to establish “systems”. Nevertheless, his negative critique of things past will be the portion both these camps invoke, while his more positive and fluid assessment of the human spirit will need await more recent times.
Standing behind the considerations of both rationalists and empiricists is also Newton. He had managed to make a synthesis of sundry current scientific insights, astounding the world with something that appeared to be the theory of everything. He had managed to take his observations of terrestrial phenomena, turn them into mathematical formulae, apply them to the solar system, observe them there, and have them there validated. Just as theories of relativity and sub-atomic structure revolutionized the twentieth century, Newton’s work constituted the foudroyant event of the seventeenth. His endeavours popularized the idea of cosmos as machine, as mathematically formulated and decipherable, and evidenced the capacity of rightly conducted investigation to understand and utilize it. Newton was a religious man; he understood the cosmos to be God’s machine, God’s manifestation. The machine was approachable mathematically, but its Maker could be worthily spoken of only poetically, with words of the heart. Such religiosity cannot be accommodated in either an empiricist or rationalist system.
There is on British soil another historical reality that is rightly considered in order to place empiricism in context. It is religion, and the tug of war between papism and fundamentalism. From the late mediaeval period forward there was near universal political and popular resistance to the rise of papal power.[i] In France, Gallicanism, the suppression or subservience of papal power and prerogative to the interest of state, becomes virtually an aspect of state. On the Iberian Peninsula, such resistance is dissipated in the re-conquest of the land from Islamic rule, the crown utilizing the power of the papacy, and the Inquisition in particular, to secure political stability and cultural uniformity. In the Germanic states, the heart lands of the Holy Roman Empire, the powers of the papacy were ruthlessly utilized or rejected according to the necessities of self-interest. The attitude here epitomizes the nation-state response to papal political and territorial aspirations: utilize when useful, ignore or counter with legislation when inconvenient, control whensoever and howsoever possible.
In England, where empiricism appears indigenous, papal power, anciently used to unify the peoples, was, by the early mediaeval period and the inception of parliamentary power, problematic. There was a constant flow of legal curtailments against “foreign” interference aimed at the papacy. Documents consistently refer not to the church, but to the English Church, the Church of or in England. There is a sensitivity that the faith may be universal, but the church in this realm is particularly and definitively “ours”. As the nation states were, like boisterous adolescents to their Holy Father’s mind, declaring their independence, England, on the cusp of the age of divine right monarchy, had a monarch in need of establishing both his perceived rights and those of the divine, rights long intimately entwined in the royal cipher as Dieu et mon droit. Henry’s idea of reformation was to keep the church in England basically of the accustomed appearance and structure, only things blatantly or inconveniently conjoined with the papacy were to be deracinated. Had Henry lived another twenty years, he may well have secured that ideal. After him, the reformers command the stage. As on the continent, there existed deep division and hostility flowing from the divaricating positions of Luther and Calvin. Further complicating the issue were the Catholics, many of whom had kept their subscription to the “old faith” cloaked, or were willing to accede to the semblance of adherence to the new ways, but all of whom were awaiting, not all passively, the moment to take back control. Dependent upon the strength of the crown, the situation brewed, hissed, boiled, or roiled. Elizabeth and James I both managed to keep command. Charles I, if not dogmatically so inclined, ritually at least enjoyed the pomp of Roman ceremonial. During his reign, the “high church” movement (led by the 17th century Caroline Divines) catapulted onto centre stage. Their understanding of Bible and Book of Common Prayer is enjoined.[ii] Their aspiration is to the Anglican ideal of a via media, the middle ground, a balance among the powers of reason, revelation, and emotion, characterized by sound learning, good order in ecclesiastical governance and divine service, trustworthy guidance in matters spiritual. Such sounds reasonable, but they are men of a grand age, an age of grand gesticulation, and so for them aggrandized ritual before the Lord God is simply proper courtesy. Not all men were of their breeding or sensitivities. Many saw in all such things the threat of papacy, foreignness, superstition, and the outright corruption of pure gospel.
Revolution toppled both crown and high church. The ensuing republic under Cromwell was no less a divine right rule than had been Charles’, but here the religious powers were of the puritanical persuasion. Ritual and all it entailed in acts of church, government and society were the verboten. This Calvinist inspired movement may have been centred on the call to personal conversion and struggle against the temptation that is the world, but it was understood to be a vocation within society, within community, and given the nature of “established church”, whether or not one felt among the called or elected, if one was a member of the nation, one was among the covenanted people, and required of law to abide within the parameters of this virtual theocracy. The familiar but too variably interpretable canon of sincere prayer, sound preaching, and goodly pastoral counsel were to make a people of the Word, by the Word, a society informed by, piously moved by, the love of God in Christ, a living exemplar of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Nations are institutions. Unlike individuals they have not emotions or passions. Such need to be applied to them, grafted onto or into them, and the prime methodology for so doing is ritual–ritual act, ritual word. Decompress ritual, truly vivifying and personalizing ritual, out of the institution of state and it is rendered something drab, sour, suffering for its lost humanity. The English nation managed such psychic suffocation for a dozen years. The restoration of the crown brought with it a reactionary riot of every delight once outlawed. It was a splendiferous time. When the threat of papacy again appeared on the guise of James II, in step with the times, circumspect concerning the sectarian violence it had in the past unleashed, and not about to be dismissed as it had been by both Charles and Cromwell, Parliament orchestrated a fittingly Glorious Revolution, and gave the crown to the king’s devotedly not too “high” or too “low” protestant daughter and her husband, thus securing its own powers, and the surety and peace of the realm.
The exhaustion of the Puritan experiment and the restoration of the crown gave space for a new philosophical attitude. The puritanically repressed humanist inclinations of the renaissance burst open in the Neo-Platonic ideas of a group of men dubbed the Cambridge Platonists. These men stood firmly against Calvin’s ideas about predestination, unbending Puritan dogmatism, and the damage such foreboding and spiritual tyranny created in both society and individual. They were equally adamantine in their opposition to the Cartesian inspired divide between mechanical cosmos and soul. They were imbued with a strong appreciation of tolerance, the presence of God in all of creation, the ability of man to reasonably live in this world and to find in it the truth of both self and God. Reason, pondering deeply the sociality of our life together, the morality of our life together, reveals the goodness of God, and allows man to decipher for himself all those ideas concerning God which are the foundation of our ideals of love and obedience. God is discovered within oneself through the ability to see things in a godly, a divine, light.
The Cambridge Platonists countered the materialists with the Platonic principle that the higher can never arise from the lower, that spirit cannot be generated by matter, that reason and understanding cannot emerge out of the sensible. The founding universal ideas are implanted by God, or in more mundane parlance, they are innate (innatism). They enter the finite world by the act of God’s will, constitute the essences of things, and imbue the mind with the intuitions that guide it to the true understanding of the universe and of God.
On this complexly rich stage of postulates and politics begins British 17th century empiricism. As Descartes wrote cogito, ergo sum [I think, therefore I am], and proceeded thence by logical deduction, Francis Bacon proclaimed the superiority of induction, a novum organum [a new instrument], countering Aristotle’s logical corpus, the Organon. The deductive logic of Aristotle is useless. It merely unfolds from its premises that which is contained in its premises (a=b, b=c, therefore, a=c), it yields nothing “new”. Only by induction (by asking if a=b, b=c, might c=d?), by systematic experimentation and astute observation can the hidden possibilities in nature be made manifest.
Bacon, Lord Chancellor of the Realm under James I, was not about to perturb the religious settlement established by Elizabeth. He readily accepts traditional enunciations of metaphysics regarding god and the soul. He seems inclined to understand them within the context of a natural, rather than a revealed, religion, but they are not his primary concern. His interest is the world. His inquiry is to uncover the principles whereby man can master nature. His inclination is materialistic, and, thus he postulates we have access only to sensible phenomena and the laws immanent within them. We have no key to whatsoever may be beyond or behind them. The mind must be wiped clean of all preconceived ideas and prejudices, arguments by analogy, appeals to innate ideas, cultural predispositions, linguistic confusions. Purified, the mind can then manoeuvre the gestalt of sensible impressions and observe their mechanics.
Bacon’s methodology constitutes the first part of the British experiment. Thomas Hobbes, who astutely took shelter in France during the revolution and republic, provides the second—the explicit declaration of materialism. All reality is merely matter in motion. Man senses this field of matter in motion. The continuous flow of experience translates internally as the flow of thought. Man’s ideas or concepts are merely generalizations made on the basis of common sensations. Linguistically, common names reflect the “common names” (concepts) in the mind. Both Heraclitus and the mediaeval nominalists had made such claims.
“Life”, “soul”, “man”–such names refer to a certain conglomerate of matter in motion, a certain train of thought. To say anything more is logically unjustifiable. There is no experience of, no possible knowledge of, an enduring substance beyond the sensation. Freedom is the sense of vacillation experienced as the competing fears, hopes, appetites, and aversions consequent to the experience of pleasure and pain are weighed. Morality consists of desire, will, controlling the sensations of pleasure and pain to obtain the maximum pleasure. God and organized religion are useless in this endeavour. Hobbes retreats from an outright attack on traditional theology, but notes that man’s curiosity and fears give rise to personifying the powers of nature, and attempting to control them with prayers and rituals. Religion manifests its inherent uselessness in its contradictory doctrines, the hypocrisy of its chieftains, and its reliance upon the inexplicable for its authority. The state, however, provides the surety of the civil and moral life. Without the state man is an ego-driven beast. Reason allows man to see he cannot exist in endless strife with other men, and so man cedes his rights to an authority, ideally the greatest possible authority, to ensure the greatest possible pleasure for each and all.
John Locke presents us the climatic statement of the experiment. He enters Oxford as Cromwell dispatches Charles to eternity. His philosophical and theological ideas do not come to full flower until reign of William and Mary. Despite some affinity with the Cambridge Platonists, he begins his epistemology refuting both them and Descartes on the founding principle. There are no innate ideas. If we have such ideas, infants and imbeciles would be aware of them. They are not. Indeed, ideas about morals and God vary from culture to culture. There are no innate ideas. The mind comes into the world a blank slate. All impressions upon it are from experience, either from sensation (sourced externally) or reflection (sourced internally). We collect and combine these in various ways and thereby produce complex impressions. The analysis of the relationships among impressions leads us to logical truths, but these are true only in the field of consciousness, only mentally, logically. The “thing” that impressed the impression, the “thing” behind the sensation or reflection, is not knowable. Locke attempted to affirm the reality of self, world and God, the objects of traditional metaphysics, but could not dispel his assessment of knowledge as impression. We may have an intuition of “self”, but this reveals only the operating of the mind, not an underlying substance, not an enduring entity named soul or self. The feeling of passivity in relation to externally sourced sensation reveals a “world”, but a world wholly conditional upon sensible impression, telling nothing certain about the source, about that which is commonly noted as reality. The logical principle of causality demonstrates the existence of “God” as the primal cause, but this is merely a logical truth, and cannot confirm any external or transcending reality.
In matters of theology, Locke must fall back upon faith. God, soul, and immortality are unprovable. We have no definitive, no empirically based knowledge of these. In his great religious work he argues for the reasonableness of Christianity. Despite the fact that the cults and cultures of Asia and China were well published, his entire work hangs on the premise that the Bible alone constitutes an authoritative revelation regarding God and soul which is not contrary to reason. Every scriptural item, or more correctly, our understanding of every scriptural item, must answer to reason, to man’s ability to live reasonably together. The true religion, Christianity, resides in confessing Jesus is the Christ, the guide to the proper and moral life, life rooted in repentance and righteousness. Adam’s fall merited not guilt, but death, the loss of immortality. Everyman is responsible for his own acts. Eternal damnation is incompatible with the loving nature of God. Miracles are in the eye of the beholder, their value resting in their ability to rouse the individual to obedience and faith. It is indeed a reasonable religion, unburdened by quizzes about predestination, eternal reprobation, saving graces, etc. He argues for religious tolerance, but exempts atheists because they undermine the foundations of morality and therein society, and papists because their adherence to a foreign power subverts the state. One cannot argue with such political practicality, something one might well expect of a man who occasionally served as a diplomat, but is such reason-able?
Whatsoever may be the deficiencies of Locke’s epistemological and theological analyses, his theorizing that man is naturally oriented toward the acknowledgment of the basic rights of life, liberty, and property successfully plants the seeds of socio-political revolution, and soon a handful of American colonies and an angry French populace will set out for the harvest.
[i]There was a period after the collapse of the Roman Empire when the Roman See, the papacy, provided Europe a type of central forum, some socio-political and moral nucleus, a neutral camp for appeal, direction, negotiation. The sustaining of such an entity requires a bureaucracy and, given the socio-political schema out of which it arises, a supreme leader. Moral and spiritual authority supported by institution necessitated some financial means. The eventually assumed rights of levy and taxation morphed into rights of territory and jurisdiction to support the venture. A central forum became a competing power, therein endangering, and at times losing, the viability of the moral and spiritual authority it had been initiated to provide.
[ii]It is a fine thing to say we will base our approach upon the agreed Book of Common Prayer and Bible, but there has always been a wide range of interpretations regarding both that book and holy writ. As I was making my trek from Rome to Canterbury, the most challenging aspect of Anglicanism was its existence as a de facto ecumenical community. By accident of English history and attitude, it has learned to tolerate just about everybody and everything. Having come to understand itself as both catholic and reformed, crypto-Presbyterians, crypto-Lutherans, crypto-Romans, et al. have all felt comfortable to find shelter within it. The high churchmen are at times more Roman than the Pope, the low churchmen can occasionally give Calvin cause to ponder his short-comings, and the broad churchmen are usually their broadly accommodating selves. Periodically there have been flares as one or the other of these has become too ostentatious in power or voice, and sometimes reformative, evangelical or mission-oriented groups, which should have found embrace, were rejected or ejected. But through time and trial, Anglicans have learned to live and let live. We have managed so to do because we have, most wisely, grown content to give assent to dogmatic propositions without being overly concerned with their explanation. The Book of Common Prayer is our meeting point, but it is a prayer book, the place we stand before God, not where we debate implications. The Articles of Faith stand our agreement of the antique principles. Their interpretations gyrate, but all agree they convey an essential and historical groundwork. There is little need to dig up and examine the foundations as long as the house—a house of prayer–is in respectable order giving shelter, nurture, and inspiration to all within the walls in the service of God and his world. It may be a matter of convenience rooted in our history, but this fluidity of understanding keeps faith un-muddled by the curse of dogmatism. It is unfortunate that today, as at times in the past, we face the rise of would be dogmatists who are so imbued in their own upbringing and interpretations that they confuse them for tradition and truth, and so misunderstand tradition, the awesome and simple-most parameters of our truth-before-God, the victory cry “Gospel”, and the meaning of religion in general. The Anglican community has been, and still can be, a very reasonable and civilized arrangement, and I am hard pressed to find fault with tolerance when we kneel before Him who, by grace, makes us one, makes us family.
An Excursus: Once upon a time, Lewis Garnsworthy, sometime Archbishop of Ontario and Bishop of Toronto, presided over an ecumenical service in his cathedral church. Standing before the assembly–attired in mitre and cope of shimmering brocade–he began by noting Protestants are very strong on matters of dogma, Romans are very strong on matters of morals, Anglicans are strong on neither dogma nor morals, but it must be admitted, we do dress well. That ability to laugh at self, at our ecclesiastical propensities, our religious idiosyncrasies, bespeaks a tolerance of self, an appreciation of the limitations and fragilities of the human compass, and such is the prerequisite for a tolerance of others. If we cannot sometimes laugh at ourselves before God, then we take ourselves far too seriously, and allow God no room to laugh at us, no room to occasionally bid us come and look upon our silliness, no room to forgive and embrace. It is a spiritual dissimulation to invoke the doctrines of the trinity and incarnation which claim God is a person, that our relationship with God is in Christ personal, and then delimit that personhood to the functions of maker and judge. Personal relationships require space, room to navigate in and about the other, a field of freedom wherein to be-with and be-for the other. A person confirmed in knowing self as an absolute, a person tenaciously obstinate about the who and what of self, is a person condemned to be un-relating and un-relatable. That is why theology claims the absolutely Holy becomes the absolutely human—not to render us absolute profundities of either grace or reprobation, but to relate to us and make us relatable to each other.