New Guides in Familiar Territory: The Division of Knowledge in Lewis, Chesterton, and Green
Contrary to popular opinion, most people consider their history an important element for understanding their present. Knowing what happened in the past offers landmarks and signposts for navigating the present.[1]
Christians especially are interested in history. If the Gospel isn’t historical, then we’re of all people most miserable (1 Cor. 15:1-20). When we look into history we see that God is sharing His work with us. Since creation we’ve been charged with the duty of caretaking creation. We’ve been given fields to cultivate and oversee, but not just physical fields. The field of knowledge is also under our care. We have the responsibility to develop this field just the same as the one in the ground and to bring out its fullness before God.
The problem is that we seem to be moving in the wrong direction. The modern world is continually throwing down reason and truth wherever they can be found. The old temple of knowledge lifted up by the philosophers and theologians of the past is being torn down bit-by-bit until, perhaps, not one brick will be left standing on another.
Our field of knowledge is in ruins and we’d like to put it back in order. Understanding how we came to this place is important, because it will help us understand how to navigate our post-modern moment and chart a course for the future. One key aspect of this history has been under serious debate for many years: what part does Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) play?
Some suggest Thomas opened the doorway into the modern epistemic world. In Evangelical circles Francis Schaeffer (1912-84) is most widely known and sometimes criticized for suggesting this historical model. Whether Schaeffer went too far has been hotly contested in recent years.
However, few are looking beyond Schaeffer to other thinkers. In this essay we will cover some familiar ground with new guides. Hearing these different voices may allow us to see aspects of this well-worn debate in a new light.
Seeking Knowledge
The foundational statement of how the Gospel changes our thoughts comes from Augustine (354-430). He argues that we grasp the truth through an understanding directed by faith: faith seeking understanding.[2] In Bradley Green’s words, “all knowledge is ultimately rooted in faith commitments.”[3] However, faith and reason are not mutually exclusive or at odds. Rather, every act of belief is only thinking with assent.[4]
Green admits that Augustine’s position originally dealt “narrowly with understanding God.”[5] However, knowing God changes our understanding of all things. In C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, a retelling of the Greek myth of Psyche and Cupid, the main character realizes: if the gods are real, then she has been wrong all of her life, and “everything [will have] to be begun over again.”[6]
Everything changes because everything has been created by God and exists fully only in relation to Him. Particular things “are not complete,” argues G. K. Chesterton, because “their reality can only be explained as part of something that is complete. It is God.”[7] Therefore, trying to apprehend the physical world outside of its relation to God is futile.
The problem of understanding isn’t merely a matter of perception, though. Our tools of investigation are degraded by sin. As sin increases, reason itself comes under fire. Decadence restricts understanding because embracing sin demands all authorities be destroyed, even the “human authority by which we do a long-division sum.”[8]
Therefore, our perception of the world changes as we acknowledge the Lordship of Christ over the world. But as Leroy Forlines has pointed out, “If there is no changed life, there is no salvation” (see 1 Jn. 3:5, 8).[9] When we honor Jesus as God, we commence lives of repentance and subject ourselves to God’s authority in “the whole of life and thought.”[10]
Still, our understanding through faith isn’t immediate. Rather, it’s a continual pursuit that will intensify in eternity but never fully end. Though God reveals Himself in the Bible, He also leaves much in darkness (see 2 Cor. 5:7).
In Lewis’s retelling, the mythical character Psyche must learn about her loving god in darkness until she is prepared, or transformed enough, to see him in all of his beauty.[11] Glorification is necessary for us to understand God and His works more fully, though never completely (see 2 Cor. 4:17-5:4). We’re being prepared for the “eternal weight of glory” (2 Co. 4:17) now as we live out our faith and continually seek understanding.[12]
Augustine, and Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) after him, held that true understanding of God could only be sought through faith. As we’ve seen, this sort of presuppositional epistemology includes our knowledge of the natural world since knowing God transforms how we understand the universe around us. Until the thirteenth century, theologians and philosophers alike walked the path of understanding that Augustine blazed.
Knowing Natural Things
Somehow, Western Civilization has largely abandoned Augustine’s epistemology, with devastating results. Chesterton wrote in 1908, “The whole modern world is at war with reason; and the tower already reels.”[13] Determining how this change came about is complex but important. Schaeffer famously (or infamously, depending on whom you ask) posited that Thomas Aquinas started the process.[14] Though some disagree, others have provided a more nuanced iteration of Schaeffer’s argument.
Thomas’s association with the break in knowledge could conceivably be traced all the way back to the thirteenth century. Chesterton suggests that Siger of Brabant (1240-1284) betrayed Thomas’s life work by arguing that truth differs in the natural world and the supernatural. Thomas vigorously combatted this division as “the perishing of all idea of religion, and even of all idea of truth.”[15] Thomas saw the madness in Siger’s thought and demanded that there was only one truth, but Siger seems to have considered his work congruent with Thomas’s.
Such confusion is understandable, because Thomas held that two paths to truth existed: the natural and the supernatural. He writes, “Therefore in any knowledge of truth the human mind stands in need of divine operations, but in knowing natural things it does not require a new light, but only its own motion and direction, although in other things it needs a new illumination.”[16]
In Thomas’s thinking, the path to truth about the natural world requires “providential working” (divine operations), but not revelation through faith (new light).[17] Accordingly, “it is not necessary that the human mind which is moved by God to know naturally known things, be infused by a new light.”[18] In other words, the Fall did not leave our faculties of observation and reason in regard to the natural world wholly broken, as Augustine argued.[19] On the other hand, to understand supernatural things, Thomas argues, “a new illumination” is required.
In this way, Thomas divided knowledge into two spheres, or as Lewis says, he “dug new chasms between God and the world, between human knowledge and reality, between faith and reason.”[20] For this reason Lesslie Newbigin describes Thomas as a “bad guy” of history over against “good” Augustine.[21]
Bradley Green notes, in a more balanced manner, that Thomas diverges from Augustine while simultaneously retaining “all sorts of fascinating parallels.”[22] One such parallel arises when Thomas contends that “natural light is obscured because of its conjunction with body and bodily powers, and impeded so that it cannot freely know even naturally knowable truth. . . .Thence it is that it is not wholly in our power to know truth, namely, because of impediments.”[23] Here, Thomas is practically in agreement with Augustine, though perhaps not completely.
In the end, Thomas’s epistemology seems somewhat conflicted. He says that truth about the natural world can be apprehended without “new light,” but our ability to know truth is impeded to the point of being unable to “freely know even naturally knowable truth.”[24]
This position reflects Thomas’s certainty that only one truth existed and that natural investigation could never contradict orthodox Christian belief or vice-versa.[25] Chesterton describes this as “a faith about fact” in which “two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition of reality.”[26]
Thus, it makes sense that Thomas fought “as with a battle-axe” against “Siger’s sophistry of the Double Mind.”[27] However, Chesterton, an extremely sympathetic biographer, also suggests that Thomas provided a “sort of charter for pioneers more purely practical than himself” to change the “traditional interpretation of Scripture” if they found it at odds with “their practical discoveries.”[28] This, of course, is precisely what happened over the intervening centuries. As science developed along purely empiricist lines, its results increasingly diverged from historic understandings of Scripture.
Conclusion
Discerning whether Thomas aligned with Augustine, divided knowledge, or merely opened the door may seem a pointless academic discussion, but some hairs need to be split very precisely. By studying where and how the break in knowledge begins, we better understand the disparity between epistemologies and the borders in between. We can then more accurately grasp and combat false worldviews in our own moment.
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[1] For more on the importance of history to average Americans from all backgrounds see Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 9.
[2] Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 39.
[3] Bradley G. Green, The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 83.
[4] Augustine of Hippo, Predestination of the Saints 5, in Vernon J. Bourke, The Essential Augustine, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974), 22.
[5] Ibid., 84.
[6] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956; repr., Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1984), 115.
[7] G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox” (1933; repr., New York: Doubleday, 1956), 141.
[8] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith (1908; repr., New York: Doubleday, 1990), 33, 34. Chesterton’s statement that even the human authority that allows us to do a long division sum must at last fall under the influence of rampant sin may seem alarmist. However, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) argues that all of scientific knowledge is only social a construct developed by scientists which is malleable and never determinate about reality. Many in both the sciences and the humanities consider The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to be one of the most important works of the twentieth century.
[9] F. Leroy Forlines, Cheap-easy Believism (Nashville: The Commission on Theological Liberalism of the National Association of Free Will Baptists, 1975), 18; see also F. Leroy Forlines, “A Plea for Unabridged Christianity,” Integrity 2 (Summer, 2003): 85-102.
[10] Forlines, “A Plea for Unabridged Christianity,” 102.
[11] Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 123.
[12] See C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (1942; rev., New York: Harper One, 1980); and C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1946).
[13] Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 32.
[14] Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason: A Penetrating Analysis of Trends in Modern Thought (1968; rev., Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2006), 15-17.
[15] Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 71, 115.
[16] Thomas Aquinas, “Theology, Faith and Reason. On Boethius on the Trinity, 1-2,” in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings, ed. Ralph McInerny (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 113.
[17] Green, 98.
[18] Thomas Aquinas, “Theology, Faith and Reason,” 114.
[19] Arminius also maintained that total depravity extended to the mind as J. Matthew Pinson has pointed out. See J. Matthew Pinson, Arminian and Baptist: Explorations in a Theological Tradition (Nashville: Randall House, 2015), 21-23.
[20] C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in the Medieval Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 110.
[21] Mark T. B. Lains, Paul Weston, eds. Theology in Missionary Perspective: Lesslie Newbigin’s Legacy (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012), 127, footnote 5.
[22] Green, 98.
[23] Thomas Aquinas, “Theology, Faith and Reason,” 114.
[24] Ibid., 113-14.
[25] Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 70.
[26] Ibid., 156, 155.
[27] Ibid., 71, 115.
[28] Ibid., 66.
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