Preliminary Dissertation On The Conformity Of Faith With Reason on Superphysics

The Truths of Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I begin with the preliminary question of the conformity of faith with reason, and the use of philosophy in theology, because:

it has much influence on the main subject of my treatise
M. Bayle introduces it everywhere.

I assume that:

The Schoolmen and the Averroists

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The question of the conformity of faith with reason has always been a great problem.

In the primitive Church, the ablest Christian authors adapted themselves to the ideas of the Platonists, which were:

The Schoolmen and the Averroists

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Plato’s Soul of the World has been taken in this sense by some.

The Stoics succumbed to that universal soul which swallows all the rest.

Those who are of this opinion might be called ‘Monopsychites’, since according to them there is in reality only one soul that subsists.

The Reformers

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Reformers, especially Luther, spoke sometimes as if they rejected philosophy, and sometimes as if they deemed it inimical to faith.

Luther understood philosophy as only that which conforms with the ordinary course of Nature, or perhaps even philosophy as it was taught in the schools.

Is Truth Above Reason?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

All theologians agree at least that no article of faith must imply contradiction or contravene proofs as exact as those of mathematics, where the opposite of the conclusion can be reduced ad absurdum, that is, to contradiction.

St. Athanasius with good reason made sport of the preposterous ideas of some writers of his time, who maintained that God had suffered without any suffering.

Human Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessary to our own errors.

Nothing would be so easy to terminate as these disputes on the rights of faith and of reason if men would make use [92]of the commonest rules of logic and reason with even a modicum of attention.

Historical and Critical Dictionary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

M. Bayle paid particular attention in his Historical and Critical Dictionary to expounding the objections of the Manichaeans and those of the Pyrrhonians, and as this procedure had been criticized by some persons zealous for religion, he placed a dissertation at the end of the second edition of this Dictionary, which aimed at showing, by examples, by authorities and by reasons, the innocence and usefulness of his course of action.

I am persuaded (as I have said above) that the specious objections one can urge against truth are very useful, and that they serve to confirm and to illumine it, giving opportunity to intelligent persons to find new openings or to turn the old to better account.

Rejecting Reason

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When the Fathers entered into a discussion, they did not simply reject reason.

In disputations with the pagans, they endeavour usually to show how paganism is contrary to reason, and how the Christian religion has the better of it on that side also.

Joshua Stegman

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bayle (p. 1002) is not satisfied with the opinion of Josua Stegman and of M. Turretin, Protestant theologians who teach that the Mysteries are contrary only to corrupt reason.

He asks, mockingly, whether by right reason is meant perchance that of an orthodox theologian and by corrupt reason that of an heretic; and he urges the objection that the evidence of the Mystery of the Trinity was no greater in the soul of Luther than in the soul of Socinius.