27.
topics, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, on which he claimed to have demonstrative proofs. He was responding to the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–17), which a century earlier had instructed philosophers to refute Averroism, the interpretation of Aristotle (384– 322 B.C.) according to which only a universal human soul survives separation from the body. Descartes tried to show that, because the human body and soul are really distinct, the immortality of individual human souls can be demonstrated.
In the Meditations themselves, however, Descartes’s proofs for the immortality of the soul and even for the existence of God pale in significance beside his attempt to give a non-Aristotelian account of knowledge and the world. Moreover, Descartes’s attempt to refute skepticism as part of this account was generally taken to be a failure. One result of this failure has been the “epistemological turn” that he gave to subsequent philosophy with its generally negative implications for religious belief. Such, at least, is the argument advanced by Pope John Paul II (b. 1920, p. 1978–) in his Crossing the Threshold of Hope (1994).
Descartes himself tried to steer clear of religious and theological controversy lest other parts of his philosophy come under suspicion. Silence was one response to theological controversy. Thus, for example, Descartes never directly mentioned a doctrine that he very early came to believe was at the basis of his philosophical thinking. This was the doctrine that all truth, including eternal truth such as is found in mathematics, depends on the will of God and, in that sense, is created. In early correspondence, Descartes was willing to have this doctrine “broadcast everywhere.” But once apprised of its controversial status among theologians, he later referred to it in his published work only twice, and then incidentally.
Theological conservatism led Descartes to suppress a treatise that he was preparing for publication.
When, in 1633, he heard of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo (1564–1642), Descartes left off the work that was posthumously published as The World and the Treatise on Man, lest he publish anything the “least word of which the Church would disapprove.” Later, in one of his most important works, Principles of Philosophy (1644), he would publish a textbook version of much of this work. The last of the principles is that “I submit all my views to the authority of the Church.” Descartes’s caution was part of his campaign on behalf of the new worldview: He hoped not only to overthrow Aristotle, but to replace him, not merely in the secular sphere of science and philosophy, but also in the religious sphere, as the philosopher best in a position to explicate the truths of faith. The caution was for naught. Far from convincing his former teachers, the Jesuits, to take up his cause, Descartes, in 1663, was placed on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books “until corrected.”
One theological topic that Descartes and his followers could not avoid—precisely because of the overthrow of Aristotle—was transubstantiation, the doctrine that the bread and wine of the Eucharist are miraculously changed into the body and blood of Christ. According to the Cartesian version of mechanism, matter, the stuff whose motion explained all natural phenomena, had as its essence extension. A material thing was merely tridimensional. It was identical to the space it occupied and nothing more. With this dramatic doctrine, the Aristotelian distinction between matter and form was swept away and, with it, the hitherto accepted way of understanding the doctrine of the Eucharist. If there were no substantial forms, then consecration could not convert the host into the body of Christ by means of transubstantiation.
Descartes and his followers tried to account for the phenomenon by focusing on the surface of the host, which as either bread or the body of Christ would have the same mechanical effects on the sensory apparatus.
The Cartesian effort to account for the Eucharist was resisted by many, and great debates over it ensued, most notably with the Jesuit Louis LeValois (1639– 1700), who, under the pseudonym of Louis de La Ville, argued the incompatibility of the Cartesian and the Roman Catholic doctrines. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) was one important thinker who agreed with LeValois, but, as a Calvinist, he concluded that it was the Catholic doctrine that was mistaken. The Catholic fideist Blaise Pascal (1623–62) passed a judgment on Descartes
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that may have been extended to all who took part in these debates: They “probe too deeply into the sciences.”
The other of the two main Cartesian doctrines also led to religious and theological problems. As extension was taken to be the essence of matter, so thought was regarded as the essence of mind. Mind and matter were the only two kinds of substance in the world, according to Descartes, who cited this dualism as a key premise in his argument for the soul’s immortality. But he developed his conception of the mind in such a way that it appeared to be cognitively self-sufficient and, hence, independent of any divine or supernatural illumination. This issue was investigated at great length by the two most important followers of Descartes, Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) and Nicolas de Malebranche (1638–1715), when they argued over the nature of ideas. There is a rationalist trajectory, in any case, that moves from Descartes to the crowning, at the French Revolution, of a naked woman as Reason in Paris’s Cathedral of Notre Dame.
The ambiguous place of Cartesianism might be epitomized by its relation to Augustinianism, a seventeenth-century touchstone of orthodoxy. Although Descartes seems to have denied the need of human beings for divine illumination, he was perceived to share much with Augustine (354–430). In fact, when Cartesianism fell upon politically hard times in the 1670s and its teaching was forbidden in the schools, Cartesians went on teaching as before but used texts from Augustine. Even this advantage had its peril, however, for it served to underline a perceived connection between the Cartesians and Port-Royal, the center of the Jansenist movement, which emphasized Augustinian theology within French Catholicism.
Madame de Sevigny’s (1626–96) epithet for René LeBossu (1631–80) says it all: “Jansenist, that is, Cartesian.” Typically, then, it was difficult to say where Cartesianism stood, or, given any stance, what its significance might be, or, given any interpretation, what its orthodoxy might be.
See also Blaise Pascal; Mechanical Philosophy; Skepticism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armogathe, J.-R. Theologia Cartesiana: L’explication de l’Eucharistie chez Descartes et dom Desgabets. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.
Cottingham, John. The Cambridge Companion to Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Gouhier, Henri. La pensée religieuse de Descartes. Paris: Vrin, 1924.
Rorty, Amelie O. Essays on Descartes’ Meditations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Shea, William R. The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of René Descartes. Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 1991.
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