AGNOSTICISM. — It is the spiritual attitude of those who suspend judgment on the existence and nature of the Absolute and of God.
1) Notion. The term was coined by T. H. Huxley (1825–95) and enjoyed a singular fortune, proliferating into systems with both positive and critical undertones, characteristic of European philosophy in the second half of the 19th century up to the condemnation of Modernism (1907). Rather than referring to a particular system, it aims to suggest a methodological and investigative caution that can be—and indeed was—adopted by the most varied and even discordant systems. This caution consists in suspending judgment regarding the ultimate content of things and consequently declaring that the problems touching the first origin of reality, the nature of God, and the final destiny of man are unattainable by the human mind. The Athenians, who, dissatisfied with the gods of the official religion, in certain circumstances raised supplications to the unknown God (ἀγνοούσας θεόν: Acts 17:23), showed themselves to be agnostic at the time of St. Paul. The Gnostics, on the other hand, were so called because they were heretics of the early centuries of Christianity who claimed to fathom, by the powers of pure reason, not only the content of natural religion but even the truths of revelation itself. In opposition to these latter, Huxley called himself an “agnostic” and chose the term agnosticism in order to have an “ism” with which to present his own thought among his colleagues in the Metaphysical Society. With this new term, he wished to warn that religious concern is, on the level of life, no less alien and indifferent—and in fact is so for many—as music and painting can be and often are.
The author, however, is not to be confused with skepticism, nor is it a “negative creed,” nor is it any creed at all: it simply affirms a criterion of moral and scientific sobriety inasmuch as it invites one to take up a position of neutrality between affirmation and negation with regard to all problems concerning the absolute. In opposition to the conviction of tradition that human intelligence grasps the nature of the being of things and is naturally led to God, and that the consideration of creatures, of the forms and modes of being of finite realities, is the “way” that permits and obliges one to recognize the infinite being, Huxley opposed the new speculative situation that had come about in modern culture thanks to Hume and Kant. Thus, according to this authoritative declaration, all those philosophies that are directly inspired by empirical phenomenalism and speculative criticism are to be called agnostic—that is, the almost totality of theories of science and reason that have appeared in the last two centuries, with the exception of Catholic philosophy and, in its own way, the totalitarian rationalism of Hegelian philosophy. Precisely because it never resolves itself into pure skepticism, every agnostic position can claim to renounce a given sector of truth because it holds fast to the truth of another sector in which the criterion of certainty finds full satisfaction. There can accordingly be multiple forms of agnosticism depending on the specific field in which one chooses to settle.
It is scientific agnosticism when certainty of truth is attributed to the realm of experimental inquiry; philosophical agnosticism if the absolute sufficiency of speculative procedures alone is proclaimed; theological agnosticism if reliance is placed solely on the communications of divine revelation. Rarely, however, is agnosticism realized in isolation in one of these pure forms, given the close affinity that binds the three fields mentioned.
2) Forms. — In David Hume (1711–76) one ought not so much speak of agnosticism as of confessed and radical speculative skepticism; nonetheless his position must be recalled first because of the importance it had in the formation of Kantian thought. The skeptical attitude, with respect to all knowledge whether natural or revealed, follows in Hume from the logical development that he was able to give with analytical genius to the “principle of experience,” posited by Locke and elaborated by Berkeley through the critique of abstract ideas and the concept of matter. The idea of cause still remained standing, at least for spiritual substances: Hume
We start in fact from the principle that all our knowledge is distinguished, by varying degrees of vividness, into “ideas” and “impressions”; the latter, being more vivid, either derive from “unknown causes” and are called “impressions of sensation,” or they are the psychic response of the reproduction of images within consciousness, and are called “impressions of reflection,” to which equally reflective ideas succeed. Only those ideas have value as knowledge which can be traced back to an impression of sensation or reflection to which they exactly correspond; in the event that such an impression is lacking, one must conclude either that the idea in question does not exist at all, or that its origin must be sought in a special principle. And it is the latter hypothesis that holds true for the notion of cause and effect, upon which all knowledge of factual reality rests: experience offers only facts of mere succession, and tells us nothing about the nature of the forces that link the succession of phenomena in nature as well as in consciousness (Treatise on Human Nature, I, I, sec. XIV). The notions of cause and effect, Hume concludes, do not belong to the realm of knowledge but must be regarded as “feelings” or “persuasions” that arise in us from the “repetition” of experiences of succession, through which, upon the appearance of one term (cause), we are spontaneously led to expect the coming of the other (effect).
Hume had been preceded in antiquity by Sextus Empiricus and in the Middle Ages by the Arab Al-Ghazali and by a large number of scholastics of the decline, belonging chiefly to the nominalist school, who did not recognize in natural reason the capacity to prove the “preambles of faith” and expressly doubted the necessary and universal value of the principle of cause (Nicholas of Ulricuria, Peter of Ailly, Ockham, and in part even Scotus himself).
I. Kant (1724–1804), taking up where Hume left off, developed the new theory of knowledge.
For an intellect that lacks its own intuition, such as ours, the only knowledge that makes science possible is that of synthetic a priori judgments, in which the “matter” of phenomena is subsumed under the form of a category of the understanding. Not only the principle of cause, but all the principles of science derive their origin and value from within the subject insofar as the subject is considered as self-consciousness; so that the “I think” stands at the origin of every category and is therefore the transcendental condition of all valid knowledge.
The only knowledge, therefore, that can present itself as "science" is that which results from the synthesis of a matter drawn from experience and a form given a priori: pure matter is blind and without order, pure form in itself is empty and without content. As is known, for Kant only mathematics and the new Newtonian physics consist of synthetic a priori judgments and realize the form of scientific knowledge; metaphysics, on the other hand, because it pretends to go beyond phenomena and grasp the noumenon, that is, the "in itself" of things, lacks any object and cannot in the future present itself as science. When, therefore, the human intellect, by its very nature bound to experience, strives to embrace the totality of being in itself and to rise to the knowledge of the First Cause, and asks what the world, the soul, and God are, it becomes lost in "antinomies" and insoluble contradictions (cf. Critique of Pure Reason, I, II, chap. 2). The noumenon of things, the world, the soul, and God Himself are indeed said to exist, but more as a limit of knowledge and a term required for its actualization than as an object of knowledge; only in the field of practical reason can man secure certainty about such objects.
More faithful to the letter of the human solution was A. Comte (1798–1857), starting from the principle that only what is susceptible to scientific experiment is to be accepted as true. The only truth, therefore, accessible to man, is that of "facts," "cataloged from time to time by experience, according as they are brought to light through the filter constituted by it." Knowledge is reduced to taking note of the "relations" that arise infinitely between fact and fact in the various orders of nature; so that for Comte, no less than for Kant, to engage in the search for efficient and final causes is to attempt to draw water with a bottomless bucket.
Of the three epochs that Comte assigned to the development of human civilization, the religious and theological epoch was placed first and was thus considered the most imperfect, which vanished with the advent of philosophy, just as philosophy in turn had to give way to science, which is the complete and definitive form of knowledge. The French sociological school (Durkheim, Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl), applying the principles of Comte’s positivism to the study of primitive peoples, explained the rise and manifestations of natural religion as an effect of the imposition that the individual receives and undergoes purely from without as a member of the clan and tribe.
More directly inspired by Kant is H. Spencer (1820–1903) with the "theory of the Unknowable," placed at the head of the "definitive exposition of his philosophy" (cf. First Principles, §§ 1–34), which inspired later forms of philosophical thought.
In Comte’s scientific age, science absorbs religion, though wrongly so. According to Spencer, science and religion, far from opposing each other, meet precisely at the moment of the ultimate determination of their respective objects. Space, time, matter, force, life, thought, freedom... for science; God the Creator, unique, personal, good, just, provident... for religion: in both, it is always the Unknowable that at a given moment comes to the fore and which it is useless to try to investigate. Unlike W. Hamilton, however, who paved the way for it (cf. op. cit., § 24), Spencer insists on attributing to his own age a distinctly positive character insofar as it aims to take into account not only the relations of “difference,” to which Hamilton limited himself, but also the “relations of similarity.”
In this way, Spencer observes, one has that “defined consciousness” points beyond itself to an “indefinite consciousness,” and incomplete thoughts refer to complete thoughts, so that it is impossible to restrict oneself to considering the relative and the conditioned without implicitly affirming the existence of the absolute and the unconditioned: atheism is therefore intrinsically unthinkable. We cannot declare that we do not know what God is without acknowledging that God exists.
More or less directly, the mentality created by Spencer can be traced back to forms of irrationalism such as pragmatism (W. James), the intuition of H. Bergson, and mysticism, according to which the criterion of truth, and the very possibility of posing the problem of the absolute, are placed in the successful outcome of action, in the subconscious impulse, in the affective and “sympathetic” (M. Scheler) union with being and with the Absolute. To the same environment of ideas belongs modernism (v.), which in its initial phase, as the encyclical Pascendi declares (Denz-U., 2072 ff.), made its own the doctrine of agnosticism, according to which “human reason is confined to the field of phenomena, of things that appear and in the manner in which they appear, so that it has neither the right nor the capacity to go beyond their boundaries. Hence it is unable to rise to God, nor to know His existence from the things that are seen, from which it necessarily follows that God in no way can be the object of science, nor is it admitted that He can be recognized as the subject of history.” It is then understood why modernists make no account of natural theology, of motives of credibility, or of external revelation, since these doctrines are—so they say—linked to intellectualism, a system they regard as ridiculous and forever obsolete. The first step to which, according to the encyclical, the agnosticism of the modernists leads is scientific and historical atheism, as its negative moment, followed by the positive moment they have constructed.
The so-called “principle of immanence,” which opens the way to an interpretation of the content of natural religion and of revealed dogmas. When compared with Catholic doctrine, Modernism is at once philosophical and theological, although in the minds of its supporters it claims to express the unlimited positivity and fruitfulness that the true unfolds in the movement of the subject’s consciousness (evolution of dogma). At this point one may recall, tinged with a., the tendency of some contemporary Catholic philosophers, which emerged during the controversy over the analyticity of the principle of causality, according to which the truth of knowing is not certified by a criterion of objective evidence but by an act of “instinctive trust,” by an emotional persuasion regarding reason’s capacity for the true (F. Sawicki, J. Hessen).
A new direction was given to a. by Existentialism, founded by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), but popularized in the first half of the 20th century by the German “Kierkegaard-Renaissance.”
According to the theologian K. Barth, “we, as theologians, must speak of God. But we are men and as such can say nothing of God. We must know both things: our duty is (in recognizing) our inability and thereby to give glory to God.” More restrained is the a. found in the “cipher theory” of the philosopher-physician K. Jaspers (1833). It is held that being never presents itself whole and directly, but always indirectly in the infinite forms it can assume in existence. Being therefore is not “given” except in aspects and “particular situations,” each of which points to certain “fundamental situations” or “limit-situations,” the last of which is insurmountable—precisely that of “always being in a situation,” of being unable to leave a situation except on condition of falling into another. Every particular situation of being is therefore, in the eyes of the existing “individual,” but a symbol and “cipher-writing” that he must interpret solely from the content of his own existence. Being, which is the all-embracing totality (Das Umgreifende), can never be grasped by the thought of the “individual”; whether referred to the being of reality, or to that of consciousness in general, or to that of spirit, it is always given as a “limit” and never as an “object” of knowledge. The ultimate cipher, to which all ciphers point, is for Jaspers the “failure” (Scheitern) of knowing as such, in which is laid bare what has been called the “illusion of philosophy” (J. Hersch).
To a philosophical form not very dissimilar from the preceding one, and perhaps influenced by it, the Italian actualism tends in its final manifestations toward a reduction of the spirit to pure act, that is, to an act that is act without residues or laws or contents other than the actuality of the act as mediation of itself. A pan-unism that is pan-realism, for which stands the affirmation that in philosophy one never arrives, because every solution is always a problem and every problem is always a solution (GENTILE).
The theological agnosticism is generally represented by those currents of theological thought which, insisting either on the transcendence of the deity or on the weakness of reason, following the sin of origin, or distrusting reason in general or the use of natural knowledge for the interpretation of the content of revealed truths, proclaim that they adhere purely to what God has made known of Himself and of His mysteries in Sacred Scripture and Tradition. First in chronological order are the supporters of "negative theology" (ἀποφατικὴ θεολογία) of Neoplatonic derivation, as found in the patristic age in the pseudo-Dionysian works and in some high medieval theologians who accepted its thought with too literal a fidelity. Similarly may be recalled the followers of the rigorous tradition or "Kalam" of Muslim theologians and the very prince of medieval Jewish theology, Rabbi MOSÈ MAIMONIDE, according to whom God cannot be named by created things with any positive term that does not resolve into a pure negation, so that calling God being, life, wisdom... has no greater propriety than calling Him stone, tree, lion, and so on. More decisively agnostic were finally those theologies that flourished in the 18th-19th centuries, which, in opposition to the excesses of libertine and Enlightenment philosophies, denied reason even the capacity to attain any truth, even of created order, and substituted for the natural activity of reason the testimony of Faith and Tradition or resorted to a certain vision of truth in the divine essence creating existences (v. FIDEISM, TRADITIONALISM, ONTOLOGISM). Despite the laudable intentions that may have inspired their supporters, all these theologies, no less than modernism, are to be considered expressly condemned by the Church (cf.: Denz.-U., nn. 1622-27, 1649-52, 1659-1665, 2072-80). In general, moreover, it should be noted that the critical discussion of each particular form of agnosticism, whether scientific, philosophical, or theological, requires examination of the individual systems to which it is connected, and especially of the epistemological presuppositions that govern II.
3) Meaning. – And yet the demand advocated by agnosticism does not in itself contain anything that directly conflicts with sound realism or with the most orthodox theology, such as, for example, Thomist theology. The attitude of reserve which agnosticism assumes with regard to the content and limits of human knowledge, both for non-natural and finite things and with regard to the divine nature, not only can be accepted and is an integral part, but belongs to the very essence of Thomist realism and Catholic theology. However, unlike the agnostic systems, which consider the negative moment of knowing either as exclusive or at least as predominant, in the thought of St. Thomas this moment is placed in a dialectical position in that it is found alongside and coexisting with the positive moment, which it is called to temper and by which it is in turn tempered. Neither rationalism nor scepticism: not only this, but one cannot even stop at a notion of God, or perhaps of the very reality of things, as of a pure “limit” about which nothing can be said except that it is inconceivable and ungraspable, since this would amount to accepting in fact that scepticism which one rejects in words. In other words, agnosticism cannot be a point of departure nor even a point of arrival; one can speak instead of an agnostic inspiration which serves to temper the pretensions of rationalism and gives to human knowledge the right balance of a knowledge that is by itself ordered to truth and to the Absolute, but also conditioned by the exercise of experience and the contingencies of life. On the basis of this recognition one could draw up a hierarchy of the various agnostic systems mentioned above, beginning with the most extreme forms (Hume, Comte) down to the most mitigated ones (Kant, Spencer), taking into account both the object to which the neutrality pertains and the intensity with which it is affirmed.
This gradation can be continued, albeit in a different sense, even within realist systems. A first observation is that one can well know that a thing exists in fact while remaining ignorant of its intimate nature; to affirm the existence of a thing, a generic, vague and confused knowledge of it suffices, provided that it is well founded. Moreover, if
One may have both positive and negative knowledge; positive knowledge is primary and fundamental, since negative knowledge is so called precisely because it delimits and specifies the scope of a prior affirmative knowledge. To admit that one has only negative knowledge of an object, or that the first knowledge one has of it is negative, is to envisage a state of consciousness that is impossible both in fact and in law. “Negative theology” is therefore necessarily preceded by “positive” or affirmative theology (χαρ-τικησις 9.).
Within positive knowledge itself, and consequently also within negative knowledge, there may be degrees, both with respect to what is presented in it (generic, distinct, proper, etc.) and with respect to the respective value of certainty. Finally, positive knowledge, according to the varying degree of penetration into the object, may be indicative, adequate, or comprehensive. It is indicative when, in some way—whether a posteriori or a priori, clearly or confusedly—it terminates at the essence of the thing; it is adequate when it distinctly grasps the essential constituents of the thing itself; and it is comprehensive when it embraces all the constitutive characters of being, can arrange them in the ontological order by which they derive from one another, and can account for all the potentialities they possess in the real development of being itself.
Perciò: 1) the human intellect, with its natural powers alone, can have a positive knowledge, not only indicative but proper and in certain cases even adequate, of the natures of the physical world as well as of its own nature and that of the soul. Through the properties which things reveal in experience and the soul in its operations, one can grasp the nature of the former and infer the more hidden nature of the latter. St. Thomas confesses that «to know something of a thing, of an idea, of an action, of an event, of a state, of a quality, of a relation, is to know its essence or quiddity, at least in a confused manner».ION
The term *ion* (from the Greek ἰόν, "going") designates an atom or group of atoms that has acquired an electric charge through the loss or gain of one or more electrons. This concept was introduced by Michael Faraday in 1834 to explain the phenomena of electrolysis. According to the modern atomic theory, an ion is formed when an atom, initially neutral, loses or gains one or more electrons from its outermost shell. If the atom loses electrons, it becomes a *cation* (positively charged ion); if it gains electrons, it becomes an *anion* (negatively charged ion).
The process of ion formation is called *ionization*. This can occur through various mechanisms, such as the action of heat, light, electric discharge, or chemical reactions. For example, in the electrolysis of water, the passage of electric current causes the dissociation of water molecules into hydrogen ions (H⁺) and hydroxide ions (OH⁻).
Ions play a fundamental role in numerous chemical and physical processes. In chemistry, they are essential for the formation of ionic compounds, such as salts, where cations and anions are held together by electrostatic forces. In physiology, ions are crucial for the transmission of nerve impulses and muscle contraction. In physics, ions are involved in phenomena such as electric conduction in gases and plasmas.
The study of ions is also of great importance in the field of spectroscopy, where the analysis of ionic spectra provides valuable information about the structure and properties of atoms and molecules. Furthermore, ions are fundamental in the operation of many technological devices, such as batteries, fuel cells, and ion propulsion systems.
BIBL.:
Faraday, *Experimental Researches in Electricity*, London 1839-1855; Arrhenius, *Recherches sur la conductibilité galvanique des électrolytes*, Stockholm 1884; Thomson, *Conduction of Electricity through Gases*, Cambridge 1903; Lewis, *Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules*, New York 1923; Pauling, *The Nature of the Chemical Bond*, Ithaca 1939.
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«All knowledge of existing things is knowledge of finite beings; and since existing things have a limit, inasmuch as they participate in being finitely, He who is above all substance is separated from all knowledge» (Div. Nom., cap. 6: PG 3, 594 A; cf. 587 D). Thus it is no cause for surprise when Dionysius asserts that man in this life «is united to God as to one altogether unknown» (Myst. Theol., cap. 1: PG 3, 1101 A). It is needless to remark that the Angelic Doctor, in his commentary on De Divinis Nominibus as in all his works, remains faithful to the spirit of this doctrine, clothing it in a more rigorous and scientific form: «This is the furthest point to which we can attain concerning divine knowledge in this life, namely, that God is above all that can be conceived by us; and therefore the naming of God by way of negation is most proper» (cap. 1, 1, 3, ed. Parm., t. XV, 271 b). And in the Prologue to Sum. Theol. 1ª, q. 3: «When it is known that a thing exists, the next step is to inquire how it exists, so that its essence may be known. But since we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how God is, but rather how He is not» (cf. In I Sent., d. 2, 1, 3, ad 2; C. Gent., III, 39; 49 and passim).
The arduous and fundamental doctrine of analogy (v. ANALOGIA) in Thomism derives from the principles indicated, which provide the key to decipher in a positive sense the mystery of human existence and to approach the incommensurable abyss of divine transcendence.