Enlightenment and Biblical Criticism

Position Paper

Originally Written: May 26, 2009

Introduction

Modern historical criticism originated through the inheritors of the Enlightenment project to ground human existence- thought, morality, politics, economic order- upon a secular rationalism that was a paradigmatic shift from the predecessor culture. This created a new worldview from which divine revelation would be interpreted in novel ways. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the epistemology inherited from the Enlightenment and then, through the lens of Gunton, MacIntyre and Ratzinger, understand its impact on modern exegesis and theological reflection. Finally, a remedy is proposed for harmful Enlightenment presuppositions.

Pre-History of the Enlightenment

Europe was experiencing the destruction of an older era and the birth of a new era from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Whatever Luther’s intentions, the doctrine of sola Scriptura birthed the antagonism that would later underpin all Enlightenment projects: the rejection of the authority. The individual was, practically speaking, exalted as the sole interpreter of the Bible, the fullness of God’s revelation. The Galileo scandal wounded severely the Church’s authority in academic matters, which was cemented by the exuberant foundation of Newtonian physics as the basis of a mechanistic natural science. Platonism became the system within which the new sciences would develop and new theologies take form. As MacIntyre states in After Virtue, “in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Aristotelian understanding of nature was repudiated at the same time as Aristotle’s influence had been expelled from both Protestant and Jansenist theology” (MacIntyre, 82).1

Birth of the Enlightenment

Francis Bacon was the herald the new “empire of man over things” in the project to make the universe bend to the will of scientific man. However, it was through the philosopher and mathematician Descartes that framed this pursuit for the Enlightenment. Descartes did not break faith from reason, but rather his problem lied with the world open to sense perception. He found the senses unreliable, open to deception and entirely passive; therefore, certain knowledge could never be attained from the sensible world. Instead he turned to rational ideas, to mathematical certainty, and only from this vantage point does he then turn to the outside world, judging it. He has his sure and certain knowledge to confidently survey the world, but at a cost: there is “the permanent and irredeemable loss of confidence in the senses” (Gunton, 17).

In his Introduction written for Pope John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them, Michael Waldstein reflects on the Cartesian project: “Descartes is very explicit. The speculative philosophy of the Scholastics must be replaced by a practical, that is, technological philosophy. Doing and especially making must determine what is, and what is not, a relevant pursuit of philosophy and its eventual offshoot, natural science” (Waldstein, 40).2 But his rigorous dualism had placed “the mechanical cosmos of extended things, whose only attributes are extension and movement, constituting an objective world of pure externality without any interiority” opposite to “the human soul, the ‘thinking thing’, whose only attribute is rational consciousness, that is, knowledge and free will, a world of pure interiority” (Waldstein, 41). Thus, the person was alienated from the world around him that he perceived through the senses.

Enlightenment: Perceptual Skepticism

John Locke and others would continue Cartesian duality and see the passive senses as outside of the activity of rational man. The senses were passive, objects imposing upon a clean sheet or tossed into an empty cabinet; but “only as rational will does the mind set to work to do anything, collating, relating and abstracting” (Gunton, 18). It is with Locke that the animosity between faith and reason is fully anchored.

Reason is the absolute arbiter in everything for Locke, but divine revelation occurs in history and through objects and people outside in the world. Locke’s perceptual skepticism cannot correspond in a real way to the objective world outside, thus becoming an obstacle to revelation. Thus, belief would be relegated to the world of subjectivity, lacking in universal truth. In a more radical skepticism, David Hume rejects the notion that any empirical knowledge, especially causality, can be had through the senses. The human mind is impotent to understand the world of the senses and also of history. Hume’s radical skepticism put the possibility of the new science in jeopardy, but at the same time it freed a person from the project to describe all of reality through philosophical speculation. It was here that he father of modern methodology, Immanuel Kant, began his work.

Engaged fully in the perceptual skepticism of those before him, Kant tried to force a link between speculation and the real world. Kant says that the mind is presented with a pluriformity, and unable to understand it according to its inherent features, the mind imposes a framework of intelligibility in order to come to some understanding. Thus faced with such a pluriformity, Kant’s answer was, “You devise a method.” This is the Kantian split between reality as it is in the world of objects and reality as known through my imposed mental frameworks.

Enlightenment: Alienation

For Gunton, this Enlightenment dualism results in two marks of alienation for human persons. The first is the tearing apart of faith and reason as two legitimate sources of knowledge. Knowledge, to be true knowing, must be rational and certain. Cartesian epistemology is the opposite of the scholastic method, rejecting the senses as the source of knowledge for the outside world. For Aquinas, truth was the correlation of the real object in the world to the mind, but for the Enlightenment it is the mind that measures reality. To Locke belongs the complete severing of faith and its utilization of mythopoeic language from knowledge. Faith in revelation is not a source of certain knowing for Locke and later thinkers.

The second mark of alienation came out of the first, as the bare objectivity of the world is met by the self-assertion of the subject, resulting not in liberation, but alienation, the cutting of the person off from the world surrounding that person. Thus the person is no longer at home in the world and no longer sees the world as capable of communicating divine realities. Rationalism, then, posits an overconfidence in human reason to gain truth, reducing the truths learned through faith as entirely too subjective, superstitious and unscientific.

Enlightenment: Perceptual Skepticism

The impact on the study of Scripture from this ideological framework led to the develop of the historical critical methods, but also to grave abuses and heterodox conclusions that the Catholic Church initially rejected in Providentissimus Deus. This critical approach did originate from Enlightenment rationalism and its concept of the rational self. Speaking from such a rational self, MacIntyre develops his critique of the peculiarly Modern fiction of objectivity as distinct from those erroneous scholastics who interpose

“an Aristotelian interpretation between themselves and experienced reality, we moderns- that is, we seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century moderns- had stripped away interpretation and theory and confronted fact and experience just as they are” (MacIntyre, 81).

The removing of "an Aristotelian interpretation" of reality created a subsequent fiction for the Enlightenment: the collection of facts. “‘Fact’ is in modern culture a folk-concept with an aristocratic ancestry.” This presupposed that “the observer can confront a fact face-to-face without any theoretical interpretation interposing itself” (MacIntyre, 79). Thus, the rational individual was thought as detached from the world, an impartial observer who brought no presuppositions to his data.

Modern Enlightenment thinkers would express this “prejudice against prejudice”, thus blinding themselves when they approached exegesis (Gunton, 4). For Cardinal Ratzinger, nothing could be more ridiculous, for “pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction. It is not the uninvolved who comes to knowledge; rather, interest itself is a requirement for the possibility of coming to know” (Ratzinger, 596).

Historical Criticism: Biblical Methodology

Critical exegesis is linked to “what Kant himself called the critical philosophy- with ‘philosophy as judge’ we might say. Once again we have... an overemphasis on the part played by the subject in contrast to that ascribed to the object of knowledge” (Gunton, 112). It was through the activity of the mind that rationality was imposed upon an otherwise intelligible world. This method of Kant is applied to biblical studies, for “the Scriptures present us with a terminal case of intrinsic meaninglessness, simply because they are so diverse” (Gunton, 113).

In confrontation with the chaos of the Bible, we impose a method by means of which we can extract some intelligibility from the text. Thus, the Bible is treated as a collection of diverse human documents, which has indeed opened up new insights and possibilities of interpretation, but also has led to the development to the hermeneutic of suspicion, that is, criticism, for any thing or person claiming authority over us has to prove itself “why and in what way it is to be heard with respect” (Gunton, 114).

Presuppositions: Evolutionary Model

This rationalism leading to the historical critical methods has also picked up other seemingly scientific presuppositions along the way. First and perhaps chief among these is the evolutionary model of textual development, using the natural science theory of evolution to explain a text’s development from the simple forms in early stages to the more complex forms later on. Ratzinger challenges this presupposition, arguing that “spiritual processes do not follow the rule of zoological genealogies. In fact, it is frequently the opposite” (Ratzinger, 598). After all, he points out later, is Clement of Rome more complex than Paul’s epistle, though it came later, or are Thomists as comprehensive as Thomas himself? This mindset also produces a backwards priority, begun in Bultmann but found throughout biblical scholarship, which is the idea of the priority of the word preached (kerygma) over the event. This means that the kerygmatic presentation is more important than the actual words and deeds of Jesus in history.

Presuppositions: A Closed System

Another model falsely applied to the Bible as a presupposition is the idea of closed system thinking derived from a Deistic vision of the universe. As Newtonian physics discovered laws of nature, the need for the sustaining intervention of the divine hand was no longer required. In fact, to the Deists any divine intervention or miracles (the Incarnation, revelation, etc.) would be self-contradictory for God to deny His own laws. Thus the world is closed off to the divine, and the Bible ceases to be regarded as a divinely revealed document and

“any other view, particularly on deriving from the past suffers the inevitable defects of crudity and lack of philosophical depth” (Gunton, 114).

Faith is divorced from reason and is reduced to some inferior form of knowing, such as religious science or anthropology or history. It is here that the scholars assume their arrogant positions as the elite insiders with access to knowledge too difficult for others to attain. The methodology “became a veritable fence which blocked access to the Bible for all the uninitiated” (Ratzinger, 595).

Faithful Criticism: A New Hermeneutic

The question is now, “Can these methods be used to benefit the Church or must they of necessity be tied to their presuppositions from whence they came?” The Church has answered affirmatively to the task of separating methodology from ideology:

“It is a method which, when used in an objective manner, implies of itself no a priori. If its use is accompanied by a priori principles, that is not something pertaining to the method itself, but to certain hermeneutical choices which govern the interpretation and can be tendentious” (IBC, 40).

To remedy this situation, the Catholic exegete must consciously approach his task within a hermeneutic of faith, meaning that he or she does not deny that God can and does operate in history, that God has revealed Himself through divine revelation and that His Son is the fullness of that revelation.

A hermeneutic of faith has its own principle presupposition: faith is a source of truth.

The human person is arrives at truth through reason and revelation. They are not opposed, as the Enlightenment thinkers would have us accept, but are complimentary and mutually supporting. Catholics are to follow Anselm’s motto of fides quarens intellectum. This faith, furthermore, has been passed down to the present day within a living Tradition in the Church.

Conclusions

To overcome the alienation of the Enlightenment one must not cut oneself off from previous methods and interpretations of the past, especially of the Fathers. Within the living Tradition of the Church comes also the interpretive authority of the Magisterium set as a servant, not master, to the Bible.

In another vein, Ratzinger encourages biblical scholars to be critical of their own methodology “in continuity with an in development of the famous critique of reason by Immanuel Kant” (Ratzinger, 596). The interpreter cannot help but read in his/her own paradigms into the texts, so self-criticism is always helpful.

Finally, exegesis is an historical discipline and so must begin with the diachronic methods, but it also has to be completed by the synchronic, utilizing “balance and moderation” with all approaches of biblical exegesis today (Pope’s Address, paragraph 14).

-gomer

AMDG

Footnotes

1 MacIntyre, Alasdair After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, University of Notre Dame Press (Notre Dame, Indiana: 1984)

2 Pope John Paul II Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body; Translation and Introduction by Michael Waldstein; Pauline Books & Media (Boston, MA: 2006)

3. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today

4. Gunton, Colin, Enlightenment and Alienation: An Essay Towards a Trinitarian Theology; Eerdmans Publishing Company (May: 1985)