The Last Word

Commonweal, Jan 30, 1998 by Edward T. Oakes

The reason that I call this view

alarming is that it is hard to know

what world picture to associate it

with, and difficult to avoid the

suspicion that the picture will be

religious, or quasi-religious.

Rationalism has always had a

more religious flavor than empiricism.

Even without God, the

idea of a natural sympathy between

the deepest truths of nature

and the deepest layers of the

human mind ... makes us more at

home in the universe than is secularly

comfortable. The thought

that the relation between mind

and the world is something fundamental

makes many people in

this day and age nervous.

To his credit, however, Nagel admits that the atheist resistance to rationalism in secular culture is more an authority hang-up than a reasonable conclusion from the facts of the universe; he even avers: "I believe this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life." These passages make me suspect that any rationalism that tries to resist Thomas's identification of God with the truth will ultimately fail.

As the example of Nietzsche himself proves. What Nietzsche illustrates so amply is that without a foundation in God, rationalism will eventually collapse into a cult of irrationality. Alone among the legions of postmodern perspectivists, he saw. One can certainly appreciate Nagel's daring effort to defend rationalism; one further salutes his lucidity of style and admires his wit (at one point he calls postmodernism "theoretical chic"). But the bizarre catalogue of errors that constitutes the "Philosophers' Brief" points to a disturbing lacuna in Nagel's whole effort: No God, no reason; no pain, no gain. Or as Nietzsche himself put it in The Gay Science, in a passage rarely quoted by his postmodern grandchildren: "Even we godless antimetaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith thousands of years old, the Christian faith, which was also the faith of Plato: that God is the truth, that truth is divine." Exactly.

Edward T. Oakes, S.J., is associate professor of religious studies at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, and author of Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Continuum). He is currently working on a book on evolutionary theory.