reading Francis Schaeffer

Crossposted at Deep Furrows

I read this book today, which I found on the remainder shelf at Half Price Books: Escape from Reason. I was intrigued by the title and by past recommendations of my friend, David Jones, so I bought it for $1. Inter-Varsity Press, 1968.

First impression: Schaeffer brings a refreshing perspective to the philosophical history of the Twentieth Century.

I really loved this book, which is a breezy introduction to modernity for modern Christians. Never have I seen Kant and Hegel summarized so concisely and so clearly. Schaeffer neatly cuts through the clutter, reminding me of an accessible Reinhold Niebuhr (I'm thinking of Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man).

Some specific notes, then.

First, the errors.

Schaeffer relies uncritically on Jacob Burkhardt's work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

He sees Thomas Aquinas as the thinker that set the Italian Renaissance in motion. He accuses Aquinas of inventing the intellectual autonomy of the human person - which strikes me as a confusion of Aquinas with Descartes. Maybe I'll have a follow up post (at Deep Furrows) which will address specifically Aquinas and unfallen reason.

He sees the Reformation as the rise within Christianity of a biblical approach to things, dismissing the patristic age (which he irritatingly refers to as Byzantine) as Platonic and the scholastic age as naturalistic. I guess it was fortunate that a biblical approach happened 1600 years after Christ...

Ok. Thomas Aquinas was a revolutionary and the Reformers were the originators of a biblical Christian culture.

Despite this unpromising start, there's much to be admired in this book.

First and foremost: it's theology that is open to human experience as expressed in art, music, and other cultural productions. In some places, he claims that these media are the expression of philosophy, but elsewhere he notes that the arts have often been ahead of philosophy.

Diagrams: any thinker who uses diagrams has my attention immediately: Lost in the Cosmos, The Religious Sense, and now Escape from Reason.

On Neoplatonism, speaking of Cosimo di Medici the Elder and Marcelino Ficino (poor Pico doesn't get mentioned), he says: «They introduced Neo-Platonism in an attempt to reinstate ideas and ideals: that is universals» (17). It would seem that Freemasonry also falls into this noble struggle to regain a sense of totality.

A new and pernicious method of learning, introduced by Hegel:

«What he [Hegel] said was this. Let us no longer think in terms of antithesis [truth and error; doctrine and heresy]. Let us think rather in terms of thesis- antithesis, with the answer always being synthesis. In so doing he changed the world. The reason Christians do not understand their children is because their children do not think any longer in the same framework in which their parents think. It is not merely that they come out with different answers. The methodology has changed.» (41)

Further on, he repeats:

«Their thinking [the children's] has changed in such a way that when you say Christianity is true the sentence does not mean to them what it means to you.» (44)

Walker Percy illustrated this problem in his two space odysseys in Lost in the Cosmos. It's the contemporary incapacity to hear the Christian proclamation. And drawing on Nietzsche, Fr. Giussani describes the "contemporary difficulty in understanding the meaning of Christian words" (see Chapter 3 of Why the Church?).

Some other notes (you're on your own):

• probably unfair criticism of Karl Barth (45)
• unreasonable faith that lacks verification (51)
• absurdity as a tool of manipulation (68)
• danger of a vague encounter (76)
• the word Jesus as the antichrist opposed to the person of Jesus (78)
• men cannot autonomously bridge the chasm between themselves and God (88)