On Methodology and Metaphysics, or What Does Philosophy Have to Do with Religion?

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank Jason Harmon, Jason Hoult, and John Mahaffy for reading my review-essay and for providing me with critical comments on it.

Notes

1. When I consecutively cite within one paragraph two or more passages from the same page of a text, I give the page number at the end of the last passage cited. I want to point out that the editing of this book is not up to the proper standards of academic publishing. The Index is neither accurate nor complete. For example, it contains two references to Hegel, but his name is not found on either of the pages indicated. There is also no reference in the Index to the names of Hegel and Boehme that are invoked in the paragraph to which this note is attached. Additionally, there are chapters in the book in which translations of quite extensive citations in Latin (chap. 16) and Italian (chap. 22) are not provided. In another chapter, the works of significant philosophers and scholars are cited without references to their works and without any of their works being given in the Bibliography (chap. 21). Further, the book contains an unhappy number of errors, while several of the essays contain non-standard English grammar and syntax. I occasionally slightly modified the punctuation and grammar in passages that I cite to facilitate their comprehension.

2. Paul writes that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because he has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Rom. 1.18–20). All biblical citations are from the Revised Standard Version.

3. The paradox is that Hobbes, while claiming to write in support of monarchy (but not of the divine right of kings), actually articulates the theologico-philosophical basis of modern democracy as the sovereign rule of all. We can well understand, then, that during the civil war in England and subsequently, the supporters of absolute monarchy (the divine right of kings) vigorously opposed Hobbes as a radical.

4. Hobbes writes in the Leviathan (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1963) that “moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. ... [A]ll men agree on this, that peace is good, and therefore also the way, or means of peace, which... are justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, and the rest of the laws of nature, are good; that is to say; moral virtues; and their contrary vices, evil. Now the science of virtue and vice, is moral philosophy; and therefore the true doctrine of the laws of nature, is the true moral philosophy” (167–68).

5. MacIsaac (in his chapter on Proclus) writes strangely regarding Kant that “almost no-one thinks his project was successful,” yet he gives no evidence for his claim and does not tell us what Kant’s project was (128).

6. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), sec. 1 (49). All emphasis is in the texts cited unless otherwise indicated.

7. It is clear that I am not critical of Proclus or of any of the ancient Greek (or Roman) philosophers (any more than I am critical of Homer or of the Greek tragedians). I am critical, rather, of those in the biblical tradition of Abraham who, in conflating Jerusalem and Athens, fail to think through their essential differences.

8. Kant, Groundwork, sec. 1, 53.

9. Rifai later states that Anselm “departs from this Greek eudaimonism” in his advocacy of “a deontology” in which moral activity transcends natural happiness (167).

10. I can only mention here that Kant, in naming what today we call the ontological argument, famously rejects it as falsely attributing necessary existence to an object of theoretical reason (as found in Neoplatonism, I would add). The irony, than which there is none greater in modern philosophy, is that, while the ontological argument that Kant explicitly rejects is not that originally formulated by Anselm and later reformulated by Descartes and Spinoza, he implicitly acknowledges the practical truth of their proving the necessary existence of God with his demonstration of the necessary relationship between will as practical reason (thought, desire) and existence. To will is (necessarily) to exist: cogito, ergo sum.

11. In the Theologico-Political Treatise, Opera, vol. 3, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925), Spinoza formulates the first of what he calls the seven principles of biblical faith: “God, that is, the supreme being, exists as the one who, most highly just and merciful, is the exemplar of true life” (chap. 14).

12. In later chapters one author refers to Avicenna’s “famous distinction between God as the ‘Self-Necessary Existent’... and everything else as ‘existent necessary through another’” (which is fully consistent with Aristotle’s distinction between two kinds of knowledge: what is known relative to us, in our ignorance, and what is known in itself, no less in our ignorance), while another author writes that Muslim philosophers “are ever beholden to Avicenna’s axial distinction between essence [God] and existing [creatures] to articulate the sui generis character of the relation between a free creator and the universe” (254, 282).

13. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that what no man has seen or heard “God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit” (2.10–13).

14. Fraenkel provides no references for any of his quotations including those subsequently taken from the works of Spinoza, none of which is found in the Bibliography.

15. Fraenkel posits a false dichotomy, in my judgment, between the roles played by the scientific and the moral revolutions in shaping modernity. For the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both scientific and philosophical—Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, Spinoza, Newton, Vico, Rousseau, Kant—are united in rejecting the Aristotelian teleology of Neoplatonism with its hierarchical chain of being.

16. I can here only mention the fact that the authors of the essays in this volume give no evidence that they are aware that “the secular” bears the same relationship to “the religious” as philosophy does to theology. They do not see, consequently, that, just as the relationship between philosophy and theology is properly dialectical and not dualistic, so the secular is the truth of the religious, just as the religious is the truth of the secular. In other words, the moral values central to modernity—equality, freedom, toleration—are, in being secular, absolutely religious (their origin is biblical). It follows that we have constantly to contend with secular, rather than religious, idolatry.

17. See my Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity. Vol. I: Hermeneutics and Ontology; Vol. II: Politics and Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007; paper, 2009).

18. Spinoza, Ethics, in Opera, vol. 2.

19. See note 12.

20. It is interesting that the Introduction concludes as follows: “In a fitting conclusion to this volume concerned with the history of hermeneutics and epistemology, Maurice Boutin asks a compelling question: how can a relation of infinity be engaged as the dynamism of significance itself?” (xxxii; emphasis added). Again, there is no acknowledgement that the idea that “a relation of infinity” makes significance dynamic is biblical, not Neoplatonic, in origin.