The Reasoning of Unreason

Universalism, Capitalism and Disenlightenment

John Roberts

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350015852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason.

1

Hereticism, Faith and the Antinomies of Reason

In this chapter, I want to put in place the premodern and early modern formation of what I have identified as the enlightenment–disenlightenment dialectic and the production of reason as they cross the borders of theology and the beginnings of theoretical science. This will, of course, mean looking at the fraught entry and presence of pagan classical philosophy and science and the heretical critique or revision of Church power into Catholic metaphysics. Indeed, in the light of these transformations, reason is accorded, for the first time in the Christian West, a heterodox and enlightened character and agency, despite being subject to a vast machinery of repression, denunciation and violence. As a result, different orders and modes of reasoning immanent to (although in some instances external to) Catholic orthodoxy reshape the religious subject-of-belief and the subject-of-reason between 1000 and 1500 and, as such, form the epistemological basis of early modernity and the early Enlightenment. Effectively, then, the fundamental reshaping of questions of universalism and particularism during this period come to be defined by the huge power struggles between peasantry and Church and State, laity and Church hierarchy, peasantry and aristocracy, Dominican orthodoxy and Franciscan defenders of radical poverty, pagan tradition and Christian spiritual entitlement, sacred truth and natural science, and, crucially, male Church authority and the desires of spiritually disenfranchised women.

Importantly, therefore, in this chapter I want to develop this analysis by looking principally at the heretical production of reason’s ‘unreasoned’ other in the medieval period: women. For, it is precisely women’s struggle to reorder the bond between Christian belief, femininity and reason – no more so than through the free participation of women in worship and the recognition of women’s knowledge and experience (historically denigrated as ‘witchcraft’) – that exposes the antinomies of medieval Catholic metaphysics and the production of reason. Indeed where reason and sacred truth are concerned, women are invariably forced or invited to dissolve their desires and practical concerns in the interests of disembodied purity and personal sanctity. This is why the anti-heretical sanctions of the Church are built precisely upon the systematization of women’s failure to ‘achieve’ reason as a result of the intrusion of bodily appetites and would-be feminine predilections and domestic duties into the realm of belief, although, in certain instances, a number of women – largely upper-class women – are granted a spiritual autonomy and religious insight, and, as such, accorded a ‘partial’ or nascent reason not accorded to illiterate peasant women or the wives of artisans. Thus we might say also that the male heretic is a thoroughly ‘feminized’ figure in these terms, insofar as he fails to achieve true reason given his susceptibility to disordered ‘feminine-like’ thinking, in as much as he is someone who willingly opens himself to febrile apparitions and passions and phantasms as opposed to the Church-centred (reason-governed) and disciplined visions of enlightened spirituality.

Reason, belief and the (feminine) visionary, then, are fundamentally conjoined in the medieval period contrary to all the familiar cliché s about medieval superstition and irrationality holding sway.¹ It is the struggle over reason that defines the expectations and claims of belief. What are the forms of reason that the devout require in order to know God? What are the forms of reasoning that God provides for all, that the devout are thereby able to use in order to achieve salvation? How might crucially reason extend faith? Or, conversely, what are those forms of reason that threaten and abuse the soul in the interests of selfish privation? And, in a more profane register, how might the advance of reason provide the material and technical resources for the waging of the Church’s political struggle against heresy and the infidel, and therefore, the pursuit of religious war and Christian conquest?² But this reordering of reason within the bounds of theology constitutes a long and uneven struggle, as the Christian Church brings the scriptures philologically into alignment with pre-Christian and classical reason, in particular Aristotle and the emerging natural sciences, and as such, operates in a faltering and hybrid fashion. Thus for a long period, reason and faith inhabited each other’s domains, the Bible and mathematics and astronomy living cheek by jowl.

In this light, I want to begin by looking at how theologized reason and ‘rational theology’ emerges after 1200 through the first ‘systematic’ Catholic thinker, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), whose reflections on science and sacred truth, truth and belief, truth and punishment, individual intellect and collective spirit (the common good) allow us to establish the primary terrain upon which the conditions of heresy and heterodoxy and reason are defined and produced within the Church in the Early Middle Ages. Indeed, Aquinas provides the first so-called rational defence of Catholic doctrine, ending, as a consequence, the association of belief with what one historian of the early Church has called a ‘theory of intuition and innate ideas and the mystical structure that is built upon it’.³ Thus for Aquinas, above all else, belief and theological judgement are not the frail and uncertain outcome of faith itself but subject to the operations of reasoned enquiry. There is no belief without reason, for without reason belief is subject to mere supposition and the threat of superstition, the domain of what later will generally be called ‘magic’ or ‘witchcraft’. As a result, the character of belief and reason are changed accordingly; belief and the truths of the Bible are available to scientific explanation and defence; and natural science, conversely, reveals the hidden work and universal presence of God’s reason in all things that the faithful, as a matter of course, should know as the condition of their faith. But if belief and science share a revelatory space, science can only ever, in the final analysis, be subordinate to faith. This is because if reason can explain the uncontested merits and life and power of faith, it cannot know the ways of faith in any complete or defining sense; faith transcends reason – at the point of truth’s spiritual revelation – and, therefore, has the last word. This is because it leads the believer, ultimately, beyond mere reason into the greater truth of Christian revelation (the Resurrection, Trinity and Incarnation).

This is the central argument of Aquinas’ rational restructuring of the conditions of reason and faith in Summa Theologica (first published in 1485, but circulated in part before Aquinas takes up his professorship at the University of Paris in 1269).⁴ In this text, Aquinas sets out to detach the conditions of belief from supposition and superstition, that is, from a range of manifestations of weak thought, or insuf ficient belief conditions that threaten the scientific basis of Christian revelation. And these manifestations of weak thought derive from the implausible, adventitious, presumptuous and illogical claims to Christian belief and revelation that invariably infect those who disregard or deny the ‘scientific’ teachings of the Church. Consequently, the ‘making of reason’ is first and foremost grounded in the Church’s privileged access to and protector of the science of belief. Hence, if the Church is where reason is defined, exercised and defended, where its special insights and provisions, its logical forms, are enacted and supported, it is also a home to a community of believers that provides a shared place for reflecting on the limits of reason divorced from faith. If reason is to be exercised in explaining how reason supports faith, it is also to be exercised in defining what distinguishes faith from reason through worship and prayer. This is reason’s recognition of the greater powers of the ‘divine science’: ‘Those things which by their sublimity transcend human reason.’⁵ Hence, reason can demonstrate what is not proper to faith (superstition), but it cannot demonstrate or prove by force of the better argument, the truth of the articles of Christian faith.⁶ The truth of the articles of faith can only be accepted through the revelation that God has revealed them to the individual, and this, in the end, is a matter of faith. In other words, believers derive their faith from accepting without contradiction that these articles of faith have been revealed by God in accordance with the teachings of the Church. If reason acts in the interests of faith, we cannot know God by natural reason alone.⁷ Only faith can provide this kind of understanding. So, if the Church enables the exercise of natural reason in the support of faith, it is nevertheless unable to master natural reason in the interests of knowing God. This is the work of the faithful themselves – as free and rational individuals – alone.

Reason and faith, therefore, are far from opposed in Aquinas. Indeed, they presuppose each other. Or rather, just as reason reveals the work of God, faith corrects reason, brings it to fruition. But if reason brings faith to fulfilment, reason itself is damaged if it deliberately occludes this process by letting what is specific to its own domain – doubt, suspicion and scepticism – intrude conspicuously into faith and misdirect it. Thus, Aquinas adopts a strict operational division on this question: In the final analysis, although reason and faith are interdependent, reason and faith are not about the same object; for, if reason weakens faith through excessive doubt and suspicion, then, any questioning of faith – or the autonomization of reason in order to subordinate faith to reason – destroys faith’s object: God’s truth. Consequently, reason without faith is the realm of the ‘particular’, whereas faith – supported by reason – attains the ‘universal’. This is so, because once reason takes upon itself to explain nature naturalistically, it threatens the integrity of God as the final cause of all things, the Uncaused Cause. ‘God is the First Mover, Himself unmoved.’⁸ For, it is only God as the Uncaused Cause that prevents the infinite regression of reason’s naturalistic explanation of causation and, in turn, atheism. Accordingly, reason and science when divorced from faith threaten the very basis of God’s truth, and, therefore, paradoxically, the ‘greater reason’ of God’s revelation.

Unsurprisingly the weakening of faith becomes fraught with the gravest – and possibly demonic – challenges, for it threatens the very foundation of the Church and the universality of faith. And this is why reason carries with it the toxin of heresy; it destabilizes faith’s good order. But we should be clear here. Reason is not itself heretical for Aquinas, even if conservative forces in Paris at the beginning of the thirteenth century thought otherwise (and, in fact, had Aquinas excommunicated – briefly – after his death for introducing pagan Aristotelian reason into the body of Catholic doctrine).⁹ As an Aristotelian, reason for Aquinas is not what faith has to ultimately suppress. Rather, reason unguided provides the malicious resources for an attack on Church authority, and therefore is susceptible to ‘unlicensed’ excess if it is not limited to its proper function: the support of faith. This is why reason is above all for Aquinas an institutional discourse tied to the fortunes of the Church and not a freely adaptable philosophical method. Outside of Church doctrine – outside of its relationship to faith – reason is simply inert. For Aquinas, consequently, hereticism is the condition of abandoning or threatening Church doctrine among the faithful. It relates not to the domain of non-Christian belief and practice but to Church doctrine alone. This is why for Aquinas there is no category of the heretic outside of the Church. Jews and Muslims are simply wayward believers and should not be persecuted; their misunderstandings and misapprehensions are tolerable, because Jews and Muslims will finally be absorbed into the greater influence and welcoming body of the Church. Jews and Muslims are simply mistaken and as such inadvertently heretical; Catholic hereticism, in contrast, is the deliberate act of the will and therefore is craven.¹⁰

On this score, Aquinas is very much a post-Cathar thinker on heresy: Heresy is not everything that lies threateningly outside of the dominion of the Church but is precisely doctrinal and, as such, is that which directly threatens the Church from within. Particularly when the threat from within declares itself the enemy of the Church. Thus, the rise of the Cathars (the Pure Ones) or Albigensians in the south of France at the beginning of the thirteenth century was undoubtedly a grave threat, because it directly confronted the secular power of the Church in the south of the country and elsewhere and consequently threatened social dissolution. Indeed, the fear of social dissolution was not idle Catholic propaganda at the time: The Cathars’ hereticism was undeniably abject, and as such, the least amenable hereticism to Church assimilation and tolerable censure, given the sect’s pre-Christian allegiances: They rejected all Christian authority – such as the taking of oaths and baptism and the veneration of the cross – and placed a fundamental emphasis on extreme righteous poverty as the necessary means for the ‘direct’ intuition of the divine. They also rejected marriage, sexual intercourse and all bodily pleasure, and encouraged converts to starve themselves into beatific states of spiritual reception, even until death.

The endura, a form of suicide, occasionally by violent means, bu t usually by taking to bed and refusing food, passing from life secure in the possession of the consolamentum on a diet of sugared water, became an occasional feature; it had always been a logical end for those who believed that life itself was an imprisonment under Satan.¹¹

These heresies are not simply part of a Western Church reform movement, they derive from Eastern and pagan anti-Christianity, specifically dualist Byzantine Bogomilism, probably spread through east-trade routes via Constantinople. A good God could not have created a world of conspicuous evil. As the Toulousian Cathar Peter Garcia admitted to the Inquisition: ‘God is perfect; nothing in the world is perfect; therefore nothing in the world was made by God.’¹² Understandably this is a period in which Catholic orthodoxy is particularly conscious of what is attached to such heresies: the long age of ‘barbarism’, which in the West is still held to be a living force through the residual adherence to pagan practices. Hereticism of this kind, accordingly, carried a deeper threat than doctrinal insubordinancy: It made the centralizing (and rationalizing) focus of the nascent state less stable. Men and women were creating ascetic communities that identified salvation with forms of self-destruction, based as these communities were on regressive forms of pagan commission (wilful ignorance). In addition, this apocalypticism was inflamed by the almost constant regional and intra-ruling class warfare across Europe at the time, under the punitive rule of the excommunicated Fredrick II, the Holy Roman emperor (1194–1250), to say nothing of the constant threat of indiscriminate violence from nobles in the towns and cities, whose actions did fall not under municipal authority.¹³ Thus such forms of abject self-destruction tended to reinforce the precariousness of peasant life and the daily habits of the laity, even if civil society in Languedoc was remarkably tolerant of non-Christian thought, particularly Judaism. On the orders of Pope Innocent III, then, a huge crusade was sent into Southern France in 1209 to attack Cathar communities, the first ever crusade in a Christian country. Tens of thousands were murdered (15,000 in the Bé ziers area alone) in an extended pogrom. The crusade was renewed in 1217, in 1224–9 and in 1244 (after a series of Cathar revolts in 1240 and 1242), and in 1255, the year the last Cathar stronghold in Qué ribus fell.¹⁴

These anti-Cathar Crusades – between 1209 and 1255 – are the context in which Aquinas produces his definition of hereticism as doctrinal failure, and this is the reason no doubt – in keeping with the heretical proscriptions of the Lateran Council in 1215 – that he calls for the death penalty for heretics.

As for heretics their sin deserves banishment, not only from the Church by excommunication, but also from this world by death. To corrupt the faith, whereby the soul lives, is much graver than to counterfeit money [one of the hereticisms singled out at the Lateran Council], which supports temporal life. Since forgers and other malefactors are summarily condemned to death by the civil authorities, with much more reason may heretics as soon as they are convicted of heresy be not only excommunicated, but also justly be put to death.¹⁵

Yet, if Aquinas mostly holds to the proscript...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Hereticism, Faith and the Antinomies of Reason
• 2 Writing Enlightenment–Disenlightenment in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
• 3 Bourgeois Universalism in the Age of Enlightenment and Nationalism
• 4 The Reasoning of Unreason as Anti-philosophy: Post-war Capitalism, Emancipatory Universalism and Radical Particularism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright