The crystallization of counter-enlightenment and philosophe identities: theological controversy and catholic enlightenment in pre-revolutionary France

Church History, Dec, 2008 by Jeffrey D. Burson

One Jesuit response to both Spinoza and Descartes would eventually prove exceptionally prominent and enduring throughout the eighteenth century. This response, crafted in various forms, especially by Claude Buffier, S.J., and Rene-Joseph Tournemine, S.J., was to argue, following Nicholas Malebranche, that true agency and causality in the universe rested only in God. When an individual perceives, senses, wills, and undertakes an action, it is in fact God who directly causes the perception, volition, and movement of the physical universe. Yet, because divine providence acts with predictable regularly at the occasion of our subjectively perceived desires, thoughts, and actions, from the vantage point of natural reason, then, ideas can be said to arise from the senses, and the possibility of empirical analysis, from the divinely willed regularity of the laws of nature. (30) To this metaphysical occasionalism is rhetorically engrafted Locke's suggestion that all individuals have a "first idea"--a self-perception of the substantial difference between their spiritual, immortal, thinking soul on the one hand, and their physical self, on the other. This notion of the "first idea" is what Buffier and Tournemine use as their means of resurrecting the older scholastic notion of a common consent-based proof of God. Though the Thomistic argument for proof of God by common consent of humankind was impossible to seriously sustain by the end of the 1600s, adapting Locke to Aristotle made it possible, so Burlier argued, to deduce from a common-sense experience two key conclusions: first, that the spiritual mind and the material body were separate, and second, that matter behaved in accordance with general principles amenable to science.

Both Locke and Buffier thus insisted that experience is not knowledge of substances, as Aquinas had argued following Aristotle. Instead, perception remains a simple idea and, as such, Buffier writes that "the first source and principle of all truth of which we are susceptible is that intimate sentiment which ... is the inherent proof of our own existence." "Divine Revelation and human authority," Buffier continued, can "make no impression" on individuals except "by the testimony of the senses." (31) In other words, perception, first of one's existence as a being that thinks, then of the rest of the world by awareness of an experientially derived conclusion (that other beings share that same intimate self-awareness), is the dualistic foundation for Buffier's philosophy. Buffier thus updates the official Aristotelian orientation of the Scholastic Jesuits by rewriting the Cartesian first principle (cogito) into sensationalist language deriving from Locke. The whole of this epistemological synthesis therefore provides the Catholic Enlightenment with a substantial overhaul of Thomistic sensationism rephrased in Lockean as well as Cartesian terms--that is, that all ideas (even our ideas of God and the cogito, itself) derive from sense perception. Even without knowledge of essence, Buffier and other clerical intellectuals could continue to believe as had Albert the Great, following Aristotle, that nothing is in the intellect that does not first come through the senses. As such, even as the Jesuits continued to openly espouse Neo-scholastic Aristotelianism, they were in effect revising St. Thomas with a healthy and rather comfortably synthesized discourse, integrating both Locke and and Malebranchian forms of Cartesianism.