An Apology for Raymond Sebond

Raymond Sebond undertook a bold project: to prove the truths of the Christian faith by natural reason, by the ordinary faculties of the human mind working upon the evidence of the created world. His critics attacked him from two directions — some said he had proved too little, others that he had proved too much, that it was impious to ground divine truth upon so frail a support as human argument. My defense of Sebond is not that he succeeded, but that his critics, in using reason to attack him, used the very instrument whose weakness was his deepest theme.

What is this reason of which we are so proud? Let us examine it seriously. We cannot agree upon the simplest matters of natural philosophy — we cannot settle whether the sun moves or stands still, whether the world is eternal or created, whether the soul survives the body or perishes with it. The ancient philosophers, the greatest minds our civilization has produced, gave incompatible answers to every question that touches on what is most important. The Stoics, the Epicureans, the Academics, the Pyrrhonists — they have cancelled each other out so completely that nothing remains except the embarrassment of the wreckage. And these were not stupid men. They gave their whole lives to inquiry. If reason were the instrument we take it to be, it would by now have delivered its results.

“Man is the most vulnerable and frail of all creatures, and withal the proudest. He sees and feels himself lodged here, amid the mire and dung of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst, the deadest, and the most stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house — and yet in his imagination he places himself above the circle of the moon and brings the sky down beneath his feet.”

Against the Pyrrhonists — those who say we can know nothing with certainty — the conventional philosopher argues that we must have some fixed point, some Archimedean ground from which to resist total skepticism. But I find the Pyrrhonist, in his very extremity, more serviceable to religion than the confident rationalist. For the man who has genuinely understood that reason cannot establish ultimate truth has cleared the ground for faith. He has swept away the pretended certainties that stand between the soul and its submission to revelation. When philosophy has done its worst and left us standing in the dark, the light that comes from elsewhere — from scripture, from grace, from the Church — comes to us uncontaminated by our prior arrangements with ourselves.

We are creatures of presumption. We examine the world and suppose we understand it because we can give it names. We observe that fire burns and suppose we know what fire is. We feel pain and suppose we comprehend the nature of the soul that suffers. But all we have done is to attach our small concepts to vast incomprehensibilities and then mistake the labels for knowledge. The animals, whom we condescend to, live as we live, feel as we feel, communicate, plan, grieve, and take pleasure — and we say they do not reason. What we mean is that they do not reason in our manner, which is like saying a river does not flow because it does not flow in a channel.

My conclusion is not nihilism. It is rather a radical humility about the pretensions of the intellect, combined with an equally radical openness to what cannot be argued for — to what can only be received. Sebond was right that creation speaks of its creator. He may have been wrong about how clearly it speaks, and how reliably we hear. But the man who comes to the limits of his reason and there stops, and waits, and listens, is nearer to truth than the man who has never tested those limits at all.