The Case for God (24 page)

Faith and Reason

B
y the end of the eleventh century, philosophers and theologians in the West had embarked on a project that, they believed, was entirely new. They had begun to apply their reasoning powers systematically to the truths of faith. By now Europe was beginning to recover from the dark age that had descended after the fall of Rome. The Benedictine monks of Cluny in Burgundy had initiated a campaign to educate the clergy and laity, many of whom were woefully ignorant of the rudiments of Christianity. Hundreds of churches were built throughout Christendom, even in quite small villages and settlements, where people could attend Mass and hear the biblical readings. This instruction was reinforced by the cult of pilgrimage. During the long, difficult trek to a holy place— Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Conques, or Glastonbury—lay folk experienced a “conversion” of life, turning away from their secular affairs and toward the centers of holiness. They traveled in a community of pilgrims, dedicated for the duration to the monastic ideals of austerity, charity, celibacy, and nonviolence. The rich had to share the hardships of the poor, who, in turn, realized that their poverty had spiritual value.
¹
Instead of being educated in the niceties of doctrine, Western Christians were introduced to their faith as a practical way of life. By the end of the century, there was a marked rise in commitment among the laity, and Europeans had begun to forge a new and distinctively Western Christian identity.

Meanwhile, as they became reacquainted with the intellectual heritage of their more sophisticated neighbors in the Greek Byzantine
and Islamic worlds, European monks had started to think and pray in a more “rational” way. One of the leading exponents of this new spirituality was Anselm of Laon, abbot of the prestigious monastery and school at Bec in Normandy, who was appointed archbishop of Canterbury by William Rufus in 1093.
²
Excited by the new vogue for reasoning, he wanted to make traditional Christian teaching rationally coherent. There was no question of making his loyalty to God dependent upon rational proof; instead he saw his writings “advancing through faith to understanding, rather than proceeding through understanding to faith.”
³
Men and women had to use all their faculties when they approached God, and Anselm wanted to make truths grasped intuitively intelligible, so that every part of his mind was involved in the contemplation of God. Augustine had taught the Christians of the West that all their mental activities reflected the divine, and this was particularly true of their reasoning powers. “I confess, Lord, with thanksgiving,” Anselm prayed in his
Proslogion
(“Colloquy”) with God, “that you have made me in your image, so that I can remember you, think of you and love you.”
⁴
This was the raison d’etre of every “rational creature,” so people must spare no effort in “remembering, understanding and loving the Supreme Good.”
⁵

But it was extremely difficult to think about God or even to work up any enthusiasm for contemplation. Anselm was acutely aware of the torpor that made prayer so difficult. In the opening verses of the
Proslogion
, which takes the form of a highly wrought poem, he laments his sense of alienation from the divine. The image of God within him was so obscured by his imperfections that, try as he would, he could not perform the task for which he had been created. He must, therefore, shake off this mental sloth, using his intellect, reason, imagination, and emotion to stir up and excite his mind; his newfound rational powers in particular were a God-given tool for rousing and kindling the spirit.

But he had no illusions about human reason, which he knew was incapable of understanding the unknowable God. “Lord, I am not trying to make my way to your height,” he prayed, “for my understanding is in no way equal to that.”
⁶
He simply wanted to grasp

Anselm is still using the verb
credere
in its original sense: it is an affair of the “heart,” the center of the human being, rather than a purely notional act and, as for Augustine, inseparable from love. Because the word “belief” has changed its meaning since Anselm’s day, it is misleading to translate, as is often done,
credo ut intellgam
as: “I believe in order that I may understand.” This gives the impression that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one’s mind to accept blindly a host of incomprehensible doctrines. Anselm is saying something quite different: religious truth made no sense without practically expressed commitment. Perhaps a better translation is “I involve myself in order that I may understand.” Anselm was trying to shake off his lethargy in prayer by engaging all his faculties, and was certain that “unless I so involve myself, I shall not understand.” So to spark his reader’s interest, he invites him to consider what has been called the “ontological proof” for the existence of God.

In the second chapter of the
Proslogion
, he asks God to help him to understand “that you exist” in the way that he has been taught.
⁸
Denys would not have approved of such a project, because God could not be said to “exist” in any way that human beings could understand. But Anselm was trying to express a similar insight in the new fashionably metaphysical terminology, in a way that would excite an eleventh-century reader. He defined God as “that thing than which nothing more perfect can be thought
[aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit].”
⁹
He was asking his readers to think of the greatest thing that they could imagine or conceive—but then go on to reflect that God was even greater and more perfect than that. God must transcend any “thing” that the human mind could envisage.

As a Platonist, it was natural for Anselm to think that the very nature
(ontos
) of God contains within it the necessity for God’s existence. “Lord my God,” he prays, “you so truly
are
, that it is not possible to think of you as not existing.”
¹⁰
Since thought was something
that happened to the thinker, an idea in the mind was an intimate encounter with the Known, so in an intellectual world still dominated by Platonism, this was a perfectly acceptable argument. Anselm had no doubt that God existed, so he was not trying to convince a skeptic. The only “atheist” he could imagine was the “fool” quoted in the Psalms who says that “there is no God.”
¹¹
Anselm believed that the idea of God was innate: even this atheist had an idea of God in his mind or he would not have been able to deny it. Even though we live in such an imperfect world, we have a notion of absolute perfection and completeness. But a perfect thing that existed only in the mind would be a contradiction in terms, since to exist in reality
(in re
) is both greater and more complete than to exist merely as a mental concept:

Therefore, Anselm concluded, “there can be no doubt at all” that this “something greater” exists “both in the understanding and in reality.”
¹³
A modern person, who inhabits an entirely different intellectual universe, cannot assume that simply because he thinks he has a hundred dollars, the money will materialize in his pocket.
¹⁴
But Anselm was not attempting a scientific or logical “proof;” rather, he was using his reasoning powers to stir up his sluggish mind so that it could “involve” itself with the immanent divine reality. And built into this “proof” was the apophatic conviction that any idea that human beings could conceive of God would inevitably fall short of the reality.

For the monks of medieval Europe,
lectio
(“reading”) was not conducted simply to acquire information but was a spiritual exercise that enabled them to enter their inner world and there confront the truths revealed in scripture to see how they measured up. Reading—in private or in the communal practice of the liturgy—was part of a process of personal transformation.
¹⁵
Every day, a monk spent time in
lectio divina
, ruminating on the sacred page until it had become an interior reality.
Lectio
was a pleasant, leisurely exercise; a monk could proceed
at his own pace until the words ignited and he “heard” their inner meaning. In his
Prayers and Meditations
, Anselm was taking this practice a stage further. Instead of communicating with the divine through the words of the Bible, he addressed God directly in his own words. He was also writing for men and women who wanted to practice
lectio divina
. In the preface, he explained that these prayers were “not to be read in a turmoil, but quietly, not skimmed or hurried through, but taken a little at a time with deep and thoughtful meditation.”
¹⁶
Readers must feel free to dip into the book and leave off wherever they choose. Its purpose was not to inform but to “stir up the mind of the reader to the love and fear of God or to self-examination.”
¹⁷
In this way,
lectio
would lead to a moment of reflection, awe, or insight. So in order to benefit, the reader must withdraw, mentally and physically, from the pressures of daily life and approach each meditation in a receptive frame of mind:

You could not approach religious ideas in the same way as you conducted business or engaged in an argument in daily life. This
logos-
driven mentality had to be set to one side in order for these prayers and meditations to come to life in the mind.

Anselm did not arrive at his “proof” by means of a strictly rational, logical process. His monks had begged him for a meditation on the meaning of faith (
fides)
, and for a long time he had struggled to find a single, self-evident argument for the reality of God. He was about to give up when an idea forced itself upon him with increasing urgency, until finally, “when I was tired out with resisting its importunity, that which I had despaired of finally came to me.”
¹⁹
His biographer Eadmer said that the “proof” arrived in a moment of rapture involving both heart and head: “Suddenly one night during matins, the grace of God illumined his heart, the whole matter becoming clear in his mind, and a great joy and exultation filled his whole being.”
²⁰
Later writers would have dwelled in detail on this “experience,” but it does
not seem to have interested either Anselm or Eadmer. Anselm was simply concerned with how best he could use it to help others. “It seemed to me that this thing which had given me such joy to discover would, if it were written down, give pleasure to any who might read it,” he explained. So he gave the
Proslogion
the subtitle
fides quaerens intellectum
, “Faith in Search of Understanding.”
²¹

Anselm was not the first to attempt a “proof” of God’s existence. During the eighth and ninth centuries, the Muslims in the Abbasid Empire had enjoyed a cultural florescence, inspired by the encounter with ancient Greek, Syriac, and Sanskrit texts, which had recently been translated into Arabic. Many of these translators were local Christians. First they had tackled the more positive sciences, such as medicine and astronomy; then they had turned their attention to the metaphysical works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, so that gradually the philosophical and scientific heritage of ancient Greece became available to the Arabic-speaking world—but with a scientific bias. Muslims began to study astronomy, alchemy, medicine, and mathematics with such success that they made impressive discoveries of their own and developed their own tradition of what they called
falsafah
(philosophy). Like the European philosophes of the eighteenth century, the
faylasufs
wanted to live in accordance with the rational laws that, they believed, governed the cosmos. They were scientists and mathematicians and wanted to apply what they had learned to their religion.

Following the example of the Greek philosophers, they began to devise their own proofs for God’s existence, based on Aristotle’s arguments for the Prime Mover and Plotinus’s doctrine of emanation.
²²
Like Anselm, none of the leading
faylasufs
—Yaqub ibn Ishaq alKindi (d. c. 870), Muhammad ibn Zakaria ar-Razi (d. c. 930), and Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. 980)—had any doubts of God’s existence, but they wanted to integrate their scientific knowledge with Qur’anic teaching. Many practiced the spiritual exercises of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, finding that these yogic techniques of concentration and chanting of mantras added a new dimension to their studies. The more radical found the idea of creation ex nihilo unacceptable on philosophical grounds, but they believed that
falsafah
and scripture
were both valid paths to God, because they served the needs of different individuals. At the same time, they were convinced that
falsafah
was a more developed form of religiosity because it was not rooted in a particular time and place but had universal appeal. The most distinguished
faylasuf
, Abu Ali ibn Sina (c. 980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna, argued that a prophet enjoyed a direct, intuitive knowledge of God that was similar to the Sufis’ and had therefore been able to bypass reason and logic, but
falsafah
could refine the idea of the divine, purge it of superstition and anthropomorphism, and prevent it from becoming idolatrous.