Charles Victor on Religion

Every morning I make my dog breakfast, the same breakfast, and as it is prepared, he jumps up and down in front of the kitchen counter—undistractedly fixated on the process–until the bowl is set in the accustomed place. The epistemologists of the eighteenth century, like the metaphysicians of the fourteenth, were likewise fixated with a process, the same old process, and were unable to break away from it. They were, forgive the change of metaphor, akin to being stuck in traffic, moving at best incrementally, fundamentally going nowhere. Evolution had not yet devised an off-ramp, some intellectual stimulus powerful enough to break the fixed-ness, the habitude, the fixation, of the situation. In 1781, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at Konigsberg, created, not simply an off-ramp, but a clover leaf. He published the first part of his trilogy on how and what we know, the Critique of Pure Reason, a critical examination of theoretical reasoning. Some may argue a clover-leaf opens the possibility of simply going in a circle and getting back on the same road. This is true–potentially. Some may argue a clover-leaf allows one to turn around and go backwards. This is true–potentially. All, however, must admit it allows traffic, and here the traffic is intellectual, to move. It did—vigourously. Continue reading →

The mediaeval mind found the world a bio-sphere, a living entity, ruled by God, by divine regula-tion, a creature approachable, amenable, amendable, at least by prayerful intercession and miracle. When Newton found the world a machine, he had the depth of soul to see it still as God’s machine. Many contemporaries proved unable to rise up and peer through Newton’s hagioscope; they saw the world as merely an “it”, a tool to be used, a thing to be mined for profit or pleasure. Such “freethinkers” were numerous, and their number was reflected in abandoned pews and abandoned morals. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

The seventeenth century is customarily hailed the age wherein theorizing about knowledge (epistemology) supplants theorizing about being (metaphysics), scientific methodology supersedes speculation. There is truth here, but it ought not to be taken as a derogation of efforts past. Continue reading →

 The rise of humanism and science in the age we call the Renaissance was in no way a disavowal of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, the ancient world, the “classic” world was experienced anew, in a new light, a new attitude. Architecture not only encloses and defines spaces, it also manifests the cultural lens through which a society understands itself and the world. Gothic architecture speaks of interiority and verticality; it is spiritual, inspirational. The classic styles of the ancients brim with claiming the solidity of the world, the exterior presence, the horizontal; they are human affirmations of power and prestige. The Renaissance is the cultic and cultural turning from the gothic to the classic. The ancient scholars are mined not for visions of god and soul, but for a new understanding of man and the functions of the world, to find in their speculations the justification for man as the centre of the world, to discover man not as the image of god, not inspired man, but expansive man, man the micro-cosmos, the microcosm, man conjoined with and in nature as the creative principle divine. In this emprise stoicism again raised its head and allowed vice to be valued on its own ground, as something removed from the constraints of traditional religion. Epicureanism excommunicated and exenterated the idea of heaven in favour of celebrating pleasure in the here and now. The ancient efforts of scepticism and eclecticism were likewise revisited. Continue reading →

Having read Spengler, and Toynbee, and referenced some others regarding the patterns in history, it strikes me someone ought to look at the evolution of the species in terms of intellectual diet. Thomas Aquinas seemingly provided a sound mixture of Christianity, Aristotle, and enough Plato to make for a well-rounded ingestion and digestion of all things past. As soon as he passes, the whole of Europe goes into a gurgitation of ideas, eructating all manner of noises, whining with centuries of costive cognitions and collywobbles, and swooning under the weight of silly speculations—academia gone mad. Continue reading →