Of Fire and Flames: Berkeley and the Development of Christian Enlightenment

*This is a repost, with some edits, of an older essay*

We're all children of the Enlightenment. Even claims to pre-modernity or Romantic reaction are, in their crudest forms, obscuring the larger social, metaphysical, and epistemological game change. Of course, the actual antagonists to Lockean empiricism or Cartesian rationalism were not trying to flee their age, but push through it. I reject the idea that modernity is some cataclysmic epochal shift, as if thousands of years of history culminated in some new age of Aquarius. I also reject most accounts of "post-modernism", treated as a homogenous monolith, as generally confused, rarely giving in-depth attention to individual authors/theorists.

Anyway, it's for this reason why I appreciate the kind of idealist-empiricism of George Berkeley. Ignore the label, it's basically useless. Berkeley offers a distinctly Christian approach to philosophy that embraces common-sense without reifying common-sense as the given means to access the Real. It's a way forward for Christians beyond empty traps, atheism, and deism.

The Foundationalist project is in total disrepair. And yet there's no way back to the "Christian-Platonic Synthesis" (a barbarism deployed goofball theologians). The use of this concept is mostly fictional and romantic. When it was in effect (if it was ever, and that's a big if), it didn't succeed because of beauty but reality. It was considered good science, a good account of knowledge about the real world, accounting for causation and how things interacted. There is much that could be said about the use of Plato, Aristotle, and various Greek metaphysicists/physicists. However, the major problems introduced were we relate to things as we experience and things as they are, as well as whether our knowledge of things is radically different than their ontic category. Nominalism is of course notorious for this skepticism about conflating our knowledge as somehow pinned onto a divine knowledge.

The Cartesian divide introduced the radical rift between mind and matter, and Locke didn't make things better. Locke, as far as I understand, almost swallowed up the former in the latter, which is saved from pure materialism through a deus ex machina (i.e. super-added qualities, such as mind to matter). The point of this contention is, perhaps, a recognition of epistemic humility: we have no idea how our subjective awareness relates to the basic categories of matter (reflected in the abstraction of extension, space, number, etc.). Thus, perhaps Locke was trying to reconfigure Cartesian theory, saving it from radical dualism. I'm not sure. However, the project ends up asserting the primacy and self-sustainability of "matter", the world of pure potency that empirical senses give us access.

It's here Berkeley intervenes, but let's pass him by for a moment to his critic Hume. The Scot didn't quite grasp Berkeley's project and turned it inside out. All we are is chaos and our knowledge of things is a castle built in air. We have customs, norms, traditions, etc. to guide us, but we have no sureness of the real world as such. That entire Enlightenment project, to come up with purely rational (and thus a-historical and de-cultured) categories to document and know everything, was a fraud. When Kant was hit with this philosophy, he awoke from his "dogmatic slumber." He was now skeptical of the popular philosophes Leibniz and Wolfe. And yet Kant didn't want a spiral into reality as simply the meaningless flux that somehow is given a faux order. Hume would probably snigger at Darwinian metaphysicists who claim some God's eye knowledge of Nature, acknowledge human epistemic weakness from a position of strength. If you can categorize all our illusions and delusions as evolutionary advantageous, you know something the others don't, like the king on the balcony watching the blind grope the elephant. These people are simply propping up their own dogmatic faith, falling into the same trap that the Encyclopedists had.

But Kant, as I understand it, had articulated a way beyond the impasse. The synthetic a-priori helped grasp the necessary truth of things, even if these truths were wholly inaccessible to a systemic critique. This wasn't a utility argument, but if morality was to exist, one needed to posit stable subjects, capable subjects, and a world-order to substantiate them. Thus the immortal soul, free will, and God, must be posited to explain civilization, with laws, duties, and judges/law-makers. Because we have these things, and they involve elements that make us richly human, their back-stop must exist as well, otherwise we're babbling idiots. The division between phenomenal and noumenal is basically to safe-guard synthetic dogmas, which make way for the empirical sciences. We don't need myths, religions, or legends to justify this state of affairs, but hard nosed philosophical rigor. We don't need a first ancestor, a heroic founder who brought us the law, or divine revelation to justify these affairs. Instead, we can sweep these away and establish a rational order that saves an inaccessible realm of faith. We can sidestep the whole question of "first principles' and posit their necessity for the basic project of rationality to go on.

Of course, critical friends like J.G. Hamann poked holes in Kant's system. As far as I understand, Hamann was not an enemy of Kant or his band of Continental Enlighteners. Rather, he was a critical ally, bemused that this synthethic edifice fell out of a few German heads, ignorant of how the world actually functions.  Time, history, experience, language, these are the very grounds for this entire conversation. That Kant had basically ignored them was peak stupidity, and the Magus of the North did his best to mock, parody, and tease Kantians into frustration. It's this alteration that constitutes the Romantic movement, not exactly a reaction, but a critical engagement. Our rationality is not so clear cut, even as Kant moved beyond machine like positivism. If we heavily weight our synthetic assumptions, ignorant that they too are a product of time, we miss the historical-humanity of the philosophical project. Instead Hamann pursues a rich Lutheran theology of creation. As Osward Bayer (a Lutheran theologian and scholar of Hamann) points out about Luther's theological method: objective and subjective are integrated through a focus on God as He is towards "me". Thus Luther seamlessly transitions:

"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

What does this mean? I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears," etc. etc.

 According to Bayer, Hamann grasped this fundamental part about Luther, seeing the seamless whole of creation yet one still dependent on the Creator. Hamann did not like the direction of emptying creation of its life, drained into the test-tubes and dictionaries of empirical dissectors and vivisectors. Such was to grope some objective perspective that was ever illusive. This logomachy of rationalist systems building reached ever further into the dark, a growing shade of nihilism (the point Hamann's fellow critic Jacobi made). Additionally to slice and dice the historical world into increasingly meaningless atoms was to reject life. As biogenesist Louis Pasteur would successfully argue, life isn't a "thing" that exists under the surface. It's not a combustion of chemicals, electricity, or faux-substance vital elan. Thus, while Kant was trying to save the Enlightenment, he was still unable to escape the contingent. The noumenal/phenomenal distinction cordoned off the realm of empirical knowledge from the realm of transcendental meaning. Put a part, Kant hoped to rescue the latter through backwards reasoning. This empirical world depends upon these transcendentals, even if they're not empirical. Rather than lapse into Hume's garrulous skepticism, Kant pursued his own project. For Hamann, Kant would lead right back into rationalist weakness with the tissue-paper defense for his own project of Enlightenment. His systems avoided the infinite complexity of life. Such was not romantic nostalgia (Hamann was also an Enlightener), but to recognize the ever-flowing present of history. Reason could not escape its ineluctable contingency and subjectivity, and yet pure subjectivity would lead to anarchic meaninglessness. Thus began the German Idealist quest.

One completely insane way to overcome this dilemma is to make the subject effectively a universal. The world was a large blob, an it, which needed to be understood, tamed, mastered. Fichte promoted this philosophy, buts its weakness (and violence) soon became apparent. But it, like Kant's project, was concerned to overcome the Cartesian dualism, between things as they are (matter) and rationality (mind). Per Fichte, one can assume a level of inoperative nonexistence on the side of the phenomenal, but that radically makes the world simply a product of human subjective knowing (or even requiring some unmediated access to a universal subject through action). Kant and other critical rationalists were the alternative, never conceding the nonexistence of objectivity, but with a tenous connection as to how any man can find it. Hamann and Herder, in their different ways, rejected this attempt to basically evacuate history. And not only man as a historical creature, but God as a living and providential lord of time. Despite Kant's efforts to save God (in theory), God becomes a synthetic retrojection to justify civilizational projects. Such was a bulwark against either the confessional fideists (as Kant had believed Jacobi and Hamann to have become) as well as atheistic materialists, whose empiricism fed off its own incoherence. Why fill the encyclopedias with a knowledge that becomes increasing atomic if one were honest. How would one not reach a Humean skepticism? Diderot and d'Holbach essentially thought man was a cunning ape, and knowledge was functionally pragmatic (not real).

Berkeley, rightly understood, offers a real alternative. To begin, he rejected the dichotomy: matter does not exist. This approach has often been lampooned in Philosophy 101 accounts (thanks, in no small part, to Hume, which he thanked as a necessary step towards skepticism). However, the real question (taken for granted) is: what is matter? Berkeley picked apart Locke/Newton's defense of primary qualities as an insane project (i.e. can you imagine a triangle without color, shape, or not of any particular type? no, abstraction is not possible). Pure potency is given a substance, but one all the way down, philosophically required to justify the distinction between the inquiring mind (subject) and the inert object. But we don't need any of that. We don't need to turn to myth or legend either. Instead, the world is simply what it appears to be. There's nothing behind the various qualia we encounter; there's no thing underneath sense data and our mental configuration of the same (i.e. seeing a bird, and then imagining a bird with fangs and laser eyes, is on the same spectrum of mental ideas).

But then what back-stop to demarcate reality from the idiosyncratic dreamworld of our own solipsistic imagination? For Berkeley, the only way was to recognize the Logos, the Mind above all minds that made this world possible. Such wasn't a synthetic concept for Berkeley: the intelligibility of things, our tentative grasp for meaning, the sheer communicability of one mind to another, apparent in time and space, demonstrated a world presided over by a supreme mind. In a sense, we live in the radically foundationless world of God's imagination. That's what reality is. Such a claim operates as an a priori theory, but it's not something invisible to the human eye. Again, the intelligible order of the world, one outside of man's control, demonstrates the existence of the Logos, Hence Psalm 19: "Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard" (Ps 19:2-3). The Logos creates the common basis through which man experiences one another.

However, given Berkeley's dualism between spirit/mind and idea, how did these two interact. Isn't this simply rephrasing the Cartesian problem? No because the spirit is a question of who while the idea is a question of what. Berkeley's middle and later career was devoted to developing these connections. At first, Berkeley posited the concept of "prejudice" as what bound various ideas together. Despite the negative connotation of ignorance or arbitrariness, prejudice meant something like a pattern that mankind weaves for themselves. Prejudices may be true or false. For Berkeley, the question wasn't trying to discover the really real beneath empirical data, but the pattern of the Mind who made these various ideas move together. Creation was a series of symbols, mysteries, riddles that minds would engage and seek to understand. To see things this way was to posit a supreme Mind, a Logos. A mindless nature would not produce signs, those would only be man's projections onto them. One either turned up to recognize a cosmic sovereign and governor, or lapsed into sollipsism or nihilism. But how does the Logos' idea, His thoughts, actually move and impact all of creation?

Berkely, in his mature work Siris (a bizarre essay/pamphlet combining an exploration of neo-Platonic metaphysics with a defense of drinking tar water), opts for energy against the empirical materialists, the living Word of Christianity against Deism:

(237) [...] Nor will it suffice from present phaenomena and effects, through a chain of natural causes, and subordinate blind agents, to trace a divine intellect as the remote original cause, that first created the world, and then set it a going, We can not make even one single step in accounting for the phaenomena, without admitting the immediate presence and immediate action of an incorporeal agent, who connects, moves, and disposes all things, according to such rules, and for such purposes as seem good to him.

Unlike the later romantics (or many contemporary theologians), Berkeley does believe in the project for universal rationality, but such is found through the revelation of the Logos in nature and, most importantly, in scripture. His philosophy was a bid to reject the radical skepticism at heart in Lockean/Newtonian empiricism/rationalism. On the one hand, he radicalized empiricism through rejecting Cartesian dualism. However this returns man not to animal-like agnosticism and practical reasoning. Rather, man's dignity is affirmed through the ability to see as the Logos sees. Man thinks God's thoughts after Him. Despite the fact that Hamann thought Berkeley was simply a mystic who preceded Hume (he refers to the bishop of Cloyne as the "Eleatic"), the idealist-skeptic pipeline, there is much between the two. Where Hamann avoided metaphysical questions, Berkeley never strongly addressed history. But both sought to see the universal through the contingent. Reality was manifest dialogically through the ruling and reigning Word. Berkeley and Hamann represent very different periods, but they advance a fundamentally Christian interpretation of Enlightenment. Nature has no existence of her own except as the beautifully crafted web from the Logos' creative speech. God as Creator and God as Savior are united through the constitutive action of the Logos: He speaks and it is.

Sadly Berkeley's metaphysical thought failed to reach deeply into Germany. Berkeley was mainly known through Hume, a Christian skeptic whose truculent high-church piety prevented him from following his argument. Such was true to the extent that the practical atheism of heterodox Deism, found in Locke, motivated the bishop to philosophically engage. Berkeley (rightly) saw Newtonian physics leading to the erasure of Nature's architect for her many mechanics and engineers (mankind). God would become an inoperative theory at best, as Nature became a machine. But if nature was the thoughts of the Logos, its intelligibility could not be so completely mechanized. And as discussed, this rationalism and empiricism would lead to nihilism and skepticism, which opened the door to a kind of irrational fideism. Berkeley did not need to believe God's presence existed at the subliminal, the inexpressible terror beyond all beyonds, but spoke in a way intelligible to man. God created the world of minds that witness the wonders of this world, able to comprehend through discourse. Humans are not bastard children of the machine. Instead, God works (energizes) in and through creation, present in nature and history, even in the miraculous events of His revealed presence to Israel. For Berkeley, philosophy revealed this Logos, though that was not good enough. Man could only understand what the Logos was in relation to the world, not who He is (hence divine revelation expressed this character).

Berkeley's project represents a fully Enlightened, yet fully Christian, philosophic project to save reason from within man's subjective world. The bishop humanizes the world in the way the Romantics claimed, yet pursues the quest for universal (or the absolute subject's) vision/reason. Unlike later romantics, who frolicked in nature's night, Berkeley the Christian rejected a self-generated/evolved world qua organism. Instead, creation is the wonderful art, the proem, of the Logos. Nature is most truly nature when it is uplifted through joyful creativity from its priests (of whom the Logos leads as chief officiator). Creation not something to subdue or worship. Rather, God and man cooperate to cultivate and beautify, filling the world with befitting symbols and signs of radiant intelligence. Such is the energy of the spirit, the trace of a mind (even the Mind) at work:

220. Force or power, strickly speaking, is in the agent alone who imparts an equivocal force to the invisible elementary fire, or animal spirit (a) of the world, and this to the ignited body or visible flame, which produceth the sense of light and heat. In this chain the first and last links are allowed to be incorporeal : the two intermediate are corporeal, being capable of motion, rarefaction, gravity, and other qualities of bodies. It is fit to distinguish these things, in order to avoid ambiguity concerning the nature of fire. (102)

"Energy" (or "fire" or "power") mediates between "idea" and "spirit", the work which holds together our mental impressions and the minds that make them. In other words, God acts in the world, but God is not simply His acts (though we can know Him through them). It's in the same way we become aware of other minds through their works, not a direct connection. Berkeley revives the Christianized neo-platonic notion of the essence-energies distinction*, which explains a host of theological and philosophical problems between God and the world. Recent Physics supports this mode of description, abandoning hard materialism for talk of energy, waves, and light. Such not only defends a Christian view of God and the world, but it also finds a way through the dichotomies and contradictions of any crude materialism

Berkeley's approach had a limited (and modified) following, and later became wildly unpopular. His contemporaries (like Hume or Samuel Johnson) rejected it for a host of stupid reasons. And these crude understandings of Berkeley translated into later accounts of his philosophy. Berkeley's project was and is an attempt of limits, a way to understand the radical openness of the world and God's presence within it. Berkeley criticized the functional atheism, the replacement of God's fiery working with a world-system. Berkeley represents the full potential of the Enlightenment to allow the breathing space for creation to energetically express its mystery and wonder. Such is precisely the definition of the modern: the mutual interpenetration of past and present in an openness to the future. In the bishop's hands, it had a distinctly Christian content.

This enlightening disposition not only applied to philosophy, but political and social theory. Reason and freedom weren't conceived in the abstract, but in relation to bloody civil war. The Enlightenment, as a continent wide project, developed from civil/confessional wars (e.g. French Wars of Religion, Dutch Independence, 30 Years War, English Civil Wars). Papal Christendom collapsed, alternative churches/confessions arose, and new ways were sought to comprehend diversities in a given kingdom. Some in the republic of letters pursued the category of "nature" to support a broad polity, with more or less Christian distinctive. History also became a means of solidifying a given polity. In Britain, a reforming Church would wrestle with various alternatives to deal with plurality without abandoning a specific Christian witness. It was into this project Berkeley participated. Without getting into specific (explicated in other essays), Berkeley advanced a Christian, yet civically broad and plural, social space.

Berkeley did not try to invent a new philosophical system, but to properly ground philosophy's relationship to theology. It was the Christian scriptures which revealed (not manufactured) the Logos, the divine governor and judge of the world. The bishop saw Locke/Newton as offering a world-system, an idol to replace theology, an alternative (and more liberal) version of Hobbes' Leviathan. And yet the problems of modernity had made themselves known. There was no going back to uncritical ignorance, conflating the modern with the ancients, or thinking we can simply ape the ancients to counter our decadent age. Berkeley's philosophy is fundamentally modern in all the right ways. For Christians, it's one of the best beginnings to take seriously the task ahead. The Logos continues to work and speak.

*When I first made this claim, it was a hunch and speculative. But then I discovered Berkeley making this point in Siris:

187. At the transfiguration, the apostles saw our Saviour's face shining as the sun, and his raiment white as light, also a lucid cloud or body of light, out of which the voice came ; which visible light and splendor was, not many centuries ago, maintained by the Greek church, 'to have been divine, and uncreated, and the very glory of God : as may be seen in the history wrote by the emperor John Cantacuzene. And of late years bishop Patrick gives it as his opinion, that in the beginning of the world, the Shecinah or divine presence, which was then frequent and ordinary, appeared by light or fire. In commenting on that passage, where Cain is said to have gone out from the presence of the Lord, the bishop observes, that if Cain after this turned a downright idolater, as many think, it is very likely he introduced the worship of the sun, as the best re semblance he could find of the glory of the Lord, which was wont to appear in a flaming light. It would be endless to enumerate all the passages of holy scripture, which confirm and illustrate this notion, or represent the Deity as appearing and operating by fire. The misconstruction of which might possibly have misled the Gnostics, Basilidians, and other ancient heretics into an opinion, that Jesus Christ was the visible corporeal sun.

The distinction here made through reference to "the Greek church" and John Cantacuzenus (the monk-emperor who endorsed Palamism) shows Berkeley is making a direct reference. God is not identical with the uncreated light, even as it obviously can't be a creature. This isn't high octane speculation, but Berkeley recognizing that God's presence in the world is not identical with the subjective identity. In other words and other terms, I don't exist apart from body and soul (as if I could cut the "I" out) but "I" am not my body or soul.