Descartes’ Legacy: the Unresolved Tension between Reason and Faith

The philosophy which ushered in modernity was very much aware that religion could not just be eliminated from society. Instead, it sought to reconcile rationality with divinity. For this article, we temporarily leave the current debate and go back in history to discuss the writing of René Descartes within its theological context. 

The religious conflicts of the seventeenth century were usually not distinguishable from political conflicts. In the early modern era, Europe was torn by religious wars. It was in this epoch that philosophers shared a strong need for order and tranquility. Philosophers were eminently interested in the question how newly formed governments would relate to religion. 

The project of order and reason
It was in this time that the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596 – 1650) travelled through Europe. Although he was a Catholic, he ventured along with the armies without choosing sides. “I was at that time in Germany where I had travelled in relation to the wars that have not ended there. Once I returned from the coronation of the Emperor to the army, the ensuing winter kept me in a town where I had every opportunity to meditate.” (1) This is how Descartes opens the second chapter in his Discourse on Method. He witnessed the religious wars from close up and saw the abysmal consequences for society. This is the context in which Descartes’ project must be understood: contemplation with the aim of using reason to lay out more perfect structures, following the perfection of God.

His need for clarity and rearrangement, so strongly invoked by modernity, strikes one when he writes: “A work that is assembled from different parts and originates from the hands of many masters, is often less perfect than things crafted by a single person.” (2) Descartes then spends the rest of the paragraph drawing an analogy. Here he compares cramped, twisting streets (built by multiple architects), with disorderly civilisations (amalgamations of different traditions and legal systems). He points out that things are superior when they are set up from one founding plan, a single leading principle, one all-encompassing thought. 

The next passage, he opens with: 

“Thus I imagined that peoples who, having once been half savages and having been civilised only little by little, have made their laws only to the extent that the inconvenience due to crimes and quarrels have forced them to do so, could not be as well ordered as those who, from the very beginning of their coming together, have followed the fundamental precepts of some prudent legislator. Likewise, it is quite certain that the state of the true religion – whose ordinances were made by God alone – must be incomparably better ordered than all the others.”  (3)

The paradox of doubt and tradition
Is Descartes ready to break with the established tradition? Yes. Is he seeking order and structure? Most certainly. But is he irreverent towards religion? Not at all.

Today we still see the urge to bring order as Descartes demonstrates it, in the worlds of business and the public sector. It sometimes happens that managers set themselves the goal of rebuilding an entire company from the ground up. Especially for new managers, the organically grown structures of the company that employs them are often unclear. Such a feeling – an urge to completely change course and start again from scratch – also threatens to take over Descartes for a moment. But he changes his mind:

“It is seen that many people demolish their houses to rebuild them, and that they are sometimes even forced to do so when the houses are in danger of collapsing and their foundations are not very strong. Considering this example, I saw that it is probably not wise for a private individual to plan to reform a state by changing everything from its foundations and overthrowing it in order to rebuild it.” (4)

From this we learn that the organically grown structures that tradition has shaped, may be confusing. They are nevertheless there for a reason: they fulfill a purpose. From this insight, Descartes draws up some rules of life for himself. The first of these is: “To obey the laws and customs of my country, and to maintain steadfastly the religion which I have been taught by the grace of God from my youth.” (5)

His philosophy can be classified as a ‘Don’t try this at home’-philosophy. There is a strong urge to doubt all established certainties – to break everything and start over from scratch. But he realizes that if people follow him in this, society will end up in an extreme, insoluble chaos. “The single resolution to rid oneself of all the opinions to which one has heretofore given credence, is an example not everyone should imitate.” (6)

God and the quest for perfect knowledge
Descartes is an individualist. He writes: “The majority opinion is worthless as a proof of truths that are difficult to discover, since it is much more likely that one man would have found them than a multitude of people.” (7) He is worried that as a child, he might on the grounds of trust and traditions, have assumed things that now turn out to be untrue. He wants to start with a clean slate and restructure the entirety of his thinking. This is the background of his famous statement: Cogito ergo sum. (8) I think and thus I am, as in order to doubt, I must exist.

Throughout a winding series of arguments, Descartes deduces from his cogito that God must exist. He has notions of things that are superior to his own individual cognition, and something superior to himself must be the cause of those notions. This leads him to think of the highest possible being, and this perfect being must necessarily exist, as something that exists, is per definition superior to something that does not exist. Concurrently, the goodness of this perfect highest being guarantees that the insights he gains throughout his reasoning do not deceive him. He uses the term “natural light” for the quality of intuitive certainty that sound notions have. He juxtaposes this light in opposition to nothingness – to the void. The lowest, most deceitful and corrupting factor in the universe.

In his Meditations, Descartes notes that for as long as his mind is centered on God, he sees no possible cause for mistakes or falsehoods. Yet, as soon as he makes himself the subject of contemplation, he notices he is vulnerable to a manifold of misconceptions. In these reflections, his mind moves across a spectrum comprised of two polarities. On the one edge, there is God, a complete and perfect being; on the other edge he finds nothingness – the state that is removed from wholeness and perfection in the most extreme degree.

Descartes then notes that he himself exists somewhere on this spectrum. It is the specific nature of his existence – resonating with the divine perfection but also carrying the influence of nothingness within his being – that makes him flawed and susceptible to errors. He then states:

“In so far that I am myself not the highest being and much of me is lacking – to that degree it is not strange that I make mistakes.” (9)

This being that Descartes encounters – this creation that contains nothingness within itself and is thus tainted and dragged down by it – carries the mark of a half-assed and faltering attempt. An imperfect creation signifies an imperfect will! How could Descartes reconcile an imperfect product, one that is so susceptible to errors and mistakes, with the perfection of a divine Creator? 

Descartes establishes that making a mistake does not merely signify a passive absence of knowledge within the subject; he defines the propensity to make a mistake as an active lack within the created subject. (10) He then states that when his mind accounts for God, he thinks it to be impossible that God created an ability within Descartes which is not perfect in its own right. In other words, it is not possible for a perfect Creator to construe in him “an aspect that lacks a perfection it ought to have.” (11)

So the good-natured God will not mislead or deceive us, because in so doing, God would have an imperfect will and that is unthinkable because God is perfect. But opposed to God stands the void of nothingness – the infinitely imperfect – and in interaction with said nothingness, God apparently does somehow create beings that are imperfect and lacking. Now how could the prefect Creator be so tainted by the nothingness that it seeps into His work?

Human fallibility
Before we proceed, it is of the highest importance that the reader grasps the full weight of this finding, and that it is part of machinations by Descartes: the daring philosopher who set out to doubt every aspect of reality, including his own existence, and who promised to himself and his readers to not accept any piece of information unless his rational mind could fully comprehend its soundness.

The same Descartes, now states: “There is no doubt that God could have created me in a way, that I would never make mistakes. […] Knowing that my nature is very weak and limited, it seems bold to investigate God’s goals.” (12)

In simpler words: “From the definition of God as a perfect being, it follows that He always and by definition wants the best. So the fact He created me as an imperfect being prone to error, must be for the best in a cosmic and universal sense. And if I cannot in my rational mind comprehend how the decision of a perfect being to create something imperfect, prone to mistakes, could possibly contribute to the perfection of the greater galactic whole, then I have nothing but my own limits and flawed nature as a point of reference.” This reasoning is particularly strange, given that Descartes’ system of investigations is built on the assumption that his rational mind can make valid judgments on even the most overarching of topics, such as the nature of reality itself.

And he says that he cannot “investigate the goals of God”. But why? His experiment of systematic investigation is powered by radical doubt and has radical doubt as the guiding principle. Now he must face the conclusion, that the perfect God whose “natural light” cannot mislead or deceive, has nevertheless made a being that is vulnerable to mistakes. Descartes folds and deflects the issue by emphasizing the deficient nature of his own rational faculties, so that his system does not have to process this incongruent fact. He absolves himself of having to explain his own imperfection: he excuses himself by referring to his flawed nature. He thus assumes an imperfection that his discourse about a ‘perfect Creator’ who cannot do anything imperfect, does not even allow. 

Come now, Descartes! Weren’t you standing on your own rational faculties to question absolutely everything on an existential scale in your quest to find unwavering certainty? Your skeptical and rational mind would be the focal point of Gods natural light, burning away any vagaries and ambiguity with the searing rays of truth…

How can we reconcile this with what he states a moment later? 

“Everything I understand, I understand indubitably correct, given that I have it from God that I understand: in that, it cannot happen that I err. Then where do my mistakes come from? From the single fact that I do not confine my will – which reaches farther than my intellect does – within the same limits, but also extend it towards that which I do not understand.” (13)

Free will and the limitations of human understanding
It is difficult to see how invoking the will helps overcome the previous impasse. Adding ‘free will’ to the equation, does not take away from the fact that a supposedly perfect Creator made an imperfect creature with a shaky and imperfect understanding of the world. After all, the perfect creator could have made a creature that has free will and has the perfect faculties to understand the world and process all information without error. 

Descartes does understand the problem:

“I see that God could have easily made it so that I – even within my freedom and provided with limited knowledge – would never be in error. In that case He would have imbued me with a clear and well-distinguishing perception of everything my intellect would ever judge. He could also achieve this by impressing that information so firmly upon my memory that I would never have to judge anything that I did not comprehend clearly and distinctly; it is simple to see that I would be more perfect than I am now, if God had made me so.” (14) 

Thinking further, it becomes hard to understand how a perfect, omniscient and omnipotent Creator, could even exist within the same universe as a less perfect being with ‘free will’. Any range of decisions and options of this individual being, would then have been foreseen by the Creator at the moment of inception, making Him ultimately accountable for the considerations made and actions taken, and not the individual. 

That individual has no ‘free will’ in the truest sense, but instead only an imperfect understanding of the world before him, and so at best makes jumpy and impulsive moves, rather than perfectly informed decisions. How ‘free’ is a will, when the mind connected to that will, cannot oversee the full consequences and corollaries of the scenario’s that lay before it? 

To speak of ‘free will’ in the true and genuine sense, one would have to make decisions informed by perfectly clear information. Else we are stumping forward in the dark on the basis of impulses and intuitions. How could that be called ‘free will’?

Maybe the freedom of the will is then that we choose our own motive when we act; maybe a ‘free’ action is a statement on what we wish to happen and not that the actions connected to our intent can necessarily guarantee that it does. But if we swap our motives for other motives, or postpone our motives altogether, it creates another problem. Since our identity is upheld by our motives, and the intent behind our will correlates with our identity, postponing our motives would alienate us from our will and not make it more free. 

If we exchange our motives for other motives, and state that some motives are more perfect and thus more liberating than other motives, it still cannot transcend the point that the inward force that guides our decisions, requires content passed down from the external order in order to shape and express itself. And free in the sense that freedom is here understood, can only be that which is the unburdened creator of itself.

Conclusion
Descartes’ philosophy represents both the bold ambition of modernity to question everything and the enduring struggle to reconcile reason with faith. His quest for certainty through radical doubt exposes the limitations of human understanding, particularly when faced with the paradox of a perfect Creator allowing imperfection in His creation. While Descartes offers profound insights into the nature of knowledge, his reluctance to fully confront the implications of divine perfection and free will leaves unresolved tensions that have echoed through philosophical debates ever since. Because of this, Descartes stands as a paragon of rationalism, but also reminds us of the ambiguities that arise when reason meets the divine.

1) Descartes, Discourse on Method, AT II, 11.
2) Ibidem.
3) Descartes, Discourse on Method, AT II, 12.
4) Discourse on Method, AT II, 13.
5) Discourse on Method, AT III, 23.
6) Discourse on Method, AT II, 15.
7) Discourse on Method, AT II, 16.
8) Discourse on Method, AT IV, 32.
9) Meditations, AT IV, 54.
10) Meditations, AT IV, 55.
11) Ibidem.
12) Ibidem.
13) Meditations, AT IV, 58.
14) Meditations, AT IV, 61.

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