AGNOSTICISM. - It is the spiritual attitude of one who suspends his judgment on the existence and nature of the Absolute and of the Divinity.
1) Notion. The term, put into circulation by Th. Huxley (1825-95), had a singular fortune in the teeming of systems with a positivist and critical background characteristic of European philosophy from the second half of the 19th century until the condemnation of modernism (1907). Rather than referring to a particular system, it is meant to suggest a caution of method and of inquiry that can be adopted — and has in fact been adopted — by the most varied and even discordant systems, a caution which is said to consist in a suspension of judgment with regard to the ultimate content of things and in the consequent declaration of the unattainability, on the part of the human mind, of the problems that touch on the first origin of reality, the nature of God and the ultimate destiny of man. Agnostics in the time of St. Paul were the Athenians, who, dissatisfied with the gods of the official religion, in certain particular circumstances raised altars and supplications to the unknown God (ἀγνώστῳ θεῷ: Acts 17:23). Gnostics, on the other hand, were called those heretics of the first centuries of Christianity who claimed to fathom with the powers of pure reason not only the content of natural religion but the revealed truths themselves. In opposition to the latter, Huxley called himself "agnostic" and chose the term a. in order to have an "ism" as well with which to present his own thought among his colleagues of the "Metaphysical Society": with the new term he wished to warn that religious concern is, on the plane of life, no less extraneous and indifferent than music and painting can be, and in fact are for many.
A., however, must not be confused with skepticism, nor is it even a "negative creed," it is no "creed" at all: it affirms a simple criterion of moral and scientific sobriety in that it invites one to settle into a position of neutrality between affirmation and negation for everything that concerns the problems of the absolute. To the persuasion of tradition that the human intelligence grasps the nature of the being of things and is borne naturally 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 infinite being, Huxley opposed the new speculative situation that had come about in modern culture through the merit of Hume and Kant. So that, according to this authoritative declaration, all those philosophies that draw directly on empirical phenomenalism and on speculative criticism are to be called agnostic, that is to say the almost totality of the theories of science and of reason that have appeared in the last two centuries, if one excepts Catholic philosophy and, in its own way, the totalitarian rationalism of Hegelian philosophy. Insofar as it indeed never resolves itself into pure skepticism, every agnostic position can claim to renounce a given sector of truth because it holds firm the truth of another sector in which the criterion of certainty finds full satisfaction. There can therefore be multiple forms of a. depending on the specific field in which one has chosen to take one's stand.
It is scientific a. when certainty of truth is attributed to the domain of experimental inquiry; philosophical if the absolute sufficiency of speculative procedures alone is proclaimed; theological if reliance is placed solely on the communications of divine revelation. Rarely, however, is a. found 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 should speak not so much of a. as of confessed and radical speculative skepticism; nevertheless his position must be recalled first because of the importance it had in the formation of Kantian thought. The skeptical attitude, with respect to every kind of knowledge, whether natural or revealed, follows in Hume from the logical development that he was able to give with genius of analysis to the "principle of experience," posited by Locke and elaborated by Berkeley with the critique of abstract ideas and of the concept of matter. There still stood the idea of cause, at least for spiritual substances: Hume showed that this went openly against the principle from which they had set out.
For one sets out from the principle that all our cognitions are distinguished, by their different degree of vivacity, into "ideas" and "impressions"; the latter, more vivid, either derive from "unknown causes" and are called "impressions of sensation," or are the psychic response of the reproduction of images within consciousness, and are called "impressions of reflection," which are followed by ideas likewise of reflection. Only those ideas have the value of knowledge that can be traced back to an impression of sensation or of reflection to which they correspond exactly: in the case where such an impression is lacking one must conclude either that the idea in question does not occur at all, or that its origin must be sought in a special principle. And it is the latter hypothesis that holds for the notion of cause and effect on which all knowledge of actual reality rests: experience offers nothing but facts of mere succession, and tells us nothing about the nature of the forces that connect the succession of the phenomena of nature as of those of consciousness (Treatise on Human Nature, I, I, sec. XIV). The notions of cause and effect, then, Hume concludes, do not belong to the domain of knowledge, but are to be considered as "sentiments" or persuasions, which are generated in us by the "repetition" of experiences of succession through which, on the appearance of one of the terms (cause) we are borne spontaneously to await the coming of the other (effect). In this Hume had been preceded in antiquity by the Pyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus and in the Middle Ages themselves by the Arab Algael and by a dense throng of scholastics of the decline, belonging predominantly to the nominalist school, who did not acknowledge in natural reason the capacity to prove the "preambula fidei" and expressly doubted the necessary and universal value of the principle of cause (Nicholas of Autrecourt, P. d'Ailly, Ockham, and in part Scotus himself).
E. Kant (1724-1804), starting from where Hume had stopped, elaborated the new theory of knowledge.
For an intellect that is deprived of an intuition of its own, as ours is, the only knowledge that makes a 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 intellect. Not only the principle of cause, but all the principles of science draw their origin and their 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 that can therefore present itself as "science" is that which results from the synthesis of a matter taken from experience and a form given a priori: pure matter is blind and without order, pure form in itself is empty and without content. For Kant, as is well known, only mathematics and the new Newtonian physics turn out to consist of synthetic a priori judgments and realize the form of scientific knowledge; metaphysics, on the other hand, because it claims to go beyond phenomena and to grasp the noumenon, that is, the "in itself" of things, comes to lack any object and cannot in the future present itself as science. When, then, the human intellect, bound by its nature to experience, strives to embrace the totality of being in itself and to raise itself up to the knowledge of the first Cause, and asks itself what the world, the soul and God are, it loses itself in inextricable "antinomies" (cf. Critique of Pure Reason, I, II, ch. 2). The noumenon of things, the world, the soul and God himself, are indeed said to exist, but more as a limit of knowing and as a term required by its actualization than as an object of it; only in the field of practical reason can man secure for himself a certainty concerning such objects.
More faithful to the letter of the Humean solution was A. Comte (1798-1857), starting from the principle that only what is susceptible of scientific experiment is to be accepted as true. The only truth, therefore, accessible to man is that of "facts," catalogued one by one by experience, according as they are brought to light through the filter constituted by it. Knowing is reduced to taking note of the "relations" that are posited to infinity between fact and fact, in the various orders of nature; so that for Comte, no less than for Kant, to set oneself to the search for efficient and final causes is to want 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 therefore considered the most imperfect, which had vanished at the arrival of philosophy, just as this in turn had to yield its place 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 the manifestations of natural religion as an effect of the imposition that the individual receives and undergoes purely from the outside insofar as he is a member of the clan and the tribe.
H. Spencer (1820-1903) draws more directly on Kant with the "theory of the Unknowable," placed at the head of the 1st part of the definitive exposition of his philosophy (cf. First Principles, §§ 1-34), by which the later forms of philosophical a. were inspired.
In Comte's scientific a., science absorbs religion, though wrongly so. According to Spencer, science and religion, far from opposing each other, meet, and precisely at the moment of the ultimate determination of their respective objects. Space, time, matter, force, life, thought, freedom... for science; God creator, one, personal, good, just, provident... for religion: in the one as in the other it is always the Unknowable that at a given moment comes forward and that it is useless to try to investigate. Unlike W. Hamilton, however, who opened the way for him (cf. op. cit., § 24), Spencer is keen to attribute to his own a. a genuine character of positivity insofar as he proposes to take account not only of the relations of "difference," at which Hamilton stopped, but also of the "relations of resemblance."
In this way, Spencer observes, it follows that "definite consciousness" points beyond itself to an "indefinite consciousness," and incomplete thoughts refer back to complete thoughts, so that it is not possible to stop at 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 recognizing that God exists.
Those forms of irrationalism, such as pragmatism (W. James), intuitionism (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 effective success of action, in the subconscious impulse, in the affective and "sympathetic" union (M. Scheler) with being and with the Absolute, can be traced back, more or less directly, to the mentality created by Spencer. To the same milieu of ideas belongs modernism (v.), which in its initial moment adopted as its own, as the encyclical Pascendi declares (Denz-U., 2072 ff.), the doctrine of a., according to which "human reason is enclosed within the field of phenomena, of things that appear and according to the mode in which they appear, so that it has neither the right nor the capacity to overstep their boundaries. Hence it is unable to raise itself to God, nor to know his existence from the things that are seen, whence it follows of necessity that God can in no way be the object of science, nor is it admitted that he can be recognized as the subject of history." One understands, then, why the modernists make no account of natural theology, of the motives of credibility and of external revelation, insofar as these are doctrines bound — they say — to intellectualism, which in their eyes is a ridiculous system and forever set.
The first step to which, according to the encyclical, the a. of the modernists leads is scientific and historical atheism, as its negative moment, which is followed by the positive moment that they have constituted in the so-called "principle of immanence," by which the passage is opened to the interpretation of the content of natural religion and of the revealed dogmas. Compared with Catholic doctrine, modernism is philosophical and theological a. together, although in the minds of its supporters it claims to express the unlimited positivity and fecundity that truth displays in the movement of the subject's consciousness (evolution of dogmas). There may be recalled at this point, as tinged with a., that tendency of certain contemporary Catholic philosophers, revealed on the occasion of the controversy over the analyticity of the principle of cause, according to which the truth of knowing is not certified in a criterion of objective evidence but by an act of instinctive "trust," by a persuasion of an emotional nature concerning the capacity that reason has for truth (F. Sawicki, J. Hessen).
A new direction has been taken by a. thanks to Existentialism, founded by Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), but brought into vogue in this 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 we 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 agnosticism found in the "theory of the cipher" of the philosopher-physician K. Jaspers (1883). It is held that being never makes itself present whole and directly, but always indirectly in the infinite forms that it can assume in existence. Being therefore is not "given" except through aspects and "particular situations," which each refer back to certain "fundamental situations" or "limit situations," of which the last and insurmountable is precisely that of "always being in a situation," of not being able to abandon a situation except on condition of falling into another. Every particular situation of being is therefore, in the eyes of the existing "individual," nothing but a symbol and a "ciphered writing" that he must interpret starting solely from the content of his existence. Being, which is all-embracing totality (Das Umgreifende), never allows itself to be embraced by the thought of the "individual"; whether it be referred to the being of reality, or to that of consciousness in general, or to that of spirit, it is always given as "limit" and never as "object" of knowing. The ultimate "cipher," to which all ciphers refer back, is for Jaspers the "shipwreck" (Scheitern) of knowing as such, in which is laid bare what has been called the "illusion of philosophy" (J. Hersch).
Toward a form of philosophical agnosticism not very different from the preceding one, and perhaps under its influence, Italian actualism inclines in its latest manifestations, with the reduction of 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-humanism that is a pan-relativism, for which stands the affirmation that in philosophy one never arrives, because every solution is always a problem and every problem always a solution (Gentile).
Theological agnosticism is represented in general by those currents of theological thought which, insisting either on the transcendence of the divinity or on the weakness of reason, in consequence of original sin, 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 the Holy Scriptures and in Tradition. First in order of time come the supporters of "negative theology" (ἀποφανικὴ θεολογία) of Neoplatonic derivation, such as is found in the patristic age in the pseudo-Areopagitic works and in certain theologians of the early Middle Ages who adopted its thought with too literal a fidelity. Similarly, one may recall the followers of the rigorous tradition or
"Kalām" of the Muslim theologians and the very prince of medieval Jewish theology, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, according to whom God cannot be named from created things by any positive term that does not resolve into a pure negation, so that to call God being, life, wisdom... has no greater propriety than to call him stone, tree, lion, and so on. More decisively agnostic were, finally, those theologies that flourished in the 17th-18th centuries, which, with the aim of opposing the excesses of libertine and Enlightenment philosophies, denied to reason the very capacity to attain any truth, even of the created order, and substituted for the natural activity of reason the testimony of Faith and Tradition, or had recourse to a certain kind of vision of truth in the divine essence creating existences (v. FIDEISM, TRADITIONALISM, ONTOLOGISM). Despite the praiseworthy intentions that may have inspired their supporters, all these theologies, no less than modernism, are to be regarded as expressly condemned by the Church (cf.: Denz-U., nos. 1622-27, 1649-52, 1659-1665, 2072-80). In general, moreover, let the warning hold that the critical discussion of each particular form of agnosticism, whether scientific, philosophical, or theological, entails the examination of the individual systems to which it is connected, and especially of the epistemological presuppositions that govern it.
3) Meaning. - And yet the demand advocated by agnosticism has in itself nothing that directly conflicts with sound realism or with the most orthodox theology, such as, for example, Thomist theology. The attitude of reserve that agnosticism assumes with respect to the content and the limits of human knowledge, both for connatural and finite things and with regard to the divine nature, not only can be accepted and is an integral part of it, but belongs to the very essence of Thomist realism and of Catholic theology. Except that, 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 it is placed in a dialectical position, inasmuch as it stands alongside and coexists with the positive moment that it is called to temper and by which it is in turn tempered. Neither rationalism nor skepticism: not only that, but one cannot even stop at a notion of God, or perhaps of the very reality of things, as of a pure "limit" of which nothing is known other than that it is unknowable and ungraspable, since this would amount to in fact accepting that skepticism which is rejected in words. In other terms, agnosticism cannot be a starting point nor even a point of arrival; one can speak instead of an agnostic inspiration which serves to dampen the pretensions of rationalism and gives to human knowledge the proper balance of a knowledge that is in itself ordered to truth and to the Absolute, but also conditioned by the exercise of experience and by the contingencies of life. On the basis of this recognition one could draw up a ranking of the various agnosticisms indicated above, beginning with the most extreme forms (Hume, Comte) down to the most mitigated (Kant, Spencer), taking into account both the object on which the neutrality bears and the intensity with which it is affirmed.
A gradation that can be continued, though in another sense, also within realist systems. A first observation is that one can well know of a thing that it exists in fact even while its intimate nature remains unknown; to affirm the existence of a thing, a generic, vague, and confused knowledge of the thing suffices, provided that it proves well founded. Moreover, if of a thing one has both a positive and a negative knowledge, the positive knowledge is the first and the fundamental one, for the reason that negative knowledge is called such precisely insofar as it restricts the scope and specifies the sense of a preceding affirmative knowledge: to admit that of an object one has only a negative knowledge, or that the first knowledge one has of it is negative, is to envisage a situation of consciousness that is impossible in fact no less than in right. "Negative theology" is therefore of necessity preceded by "positive" or affirmative theology (καταστασία). Moreover, within positive knowledge itself, and consequently also in negative knowledge, there can be degrees, both by reason of what is made present in it (generic, distinct, proper...), and by reason of their respective value of certainty. Positive knowledge, finally, according to the different degree of penetration into the interior of the object, can be indicative, adequate and comprehensive. Indicative is the knowledge that in some way, a posteriori or a priori, distinctly or confusedly, terminates at the essence of the thing; it is adequate when it distinctly grasps the essential constituents of the thing itself; it is comprehensive when it embraces all the constitutive characters of the being, can arrange them in the ontological order that effectively makes them derive one from another, and can give an account of all the potentialities of which they are susceptible in the real development of that same being.
Therefore: 1) the human intellect, by 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 that things reveal in experience and the soul in its operations, one can conceive the nature of the one and infer the more recondite nature of the other. St. Thomas confesses that "cognoscere quid sit anima, difficilimum est" (De Veritate, X, 8 ad 8; cf. In I Sent., d. 3, 1, 2 ad 33; ibid., IV, 5; Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 87, ad 1), yet he does not say that it is impossible; and this is to be admitted also for its properties, on which the very framing of human life depends (spirituality and immortality). 2) The human intellect, in its natural conditions of exercise, cannot achieve any comprehensive knowledge either of corporeal or of spiritual substances. Such knowledge would be possible on the condition that one could comprehend prime matter and created freedom, but this is reserved to the divine intellect, which is the first Cause and the first Mover and on which therefore every contingent cause depends. St. Thomas often repeats that the ultimate and constitutive differences of the essences of things are hidden from us and that we must be content to indicate them by means of properties. 3) The human intellect, suitably disciplined, can by natural human powers alone demonstrate the existence of God and recognize his principal attributes, both absolute (unity, simplicity, goodness, truth...) and relative to the created world (creator, omnipotent, omniscient, provident...). Finite things indeed reveal themselves as effects of an infinite cause, and in effects there always appears "in some way" a likeness of the nature of the cause. It is therefore a positive and in a certain sense distinct knowledge, insofar as God is clearly separated from every other being; nevertheless it is a purely "indicative" knowledge, yet a real knowledge and the noblest among all knowledges: "Est autem, in his quae de Deo confitemur, duplex veritatis modus. Quaedam namque vera sunt de Deo quae omnem facultatem humanae rationis excedunt, ut Deum esse unum et trinum. Quaedam vero sunt ad quae etiam ratio naturalis pertingere potest, sicut est Deum esse, Deum esse unum, et alia huiusmodi; quae etiam philosophi demonstrative de Deo probaverunt, ducti naturalis lumine rationis" (C. Gent., I, 3). 4) Since the perfections found in creatures are in themselves finite, and therefore incommensurable with the infinity that these same perfections have in God, the human intellect, left to its natural resources and obliged for its exercise to depend on the senses, can never attain a proper and adequate knowledge, and still less a comprehensive one, of the divine essence. In this matter we must be content with the "quia est", without claiming to touch the "quid est", as the Angelic Doctor clarifies in the continuation of the last text cited. And this same knowledge, as the holy Doctor hastens to warn in the chapter that immediately follows, is granted to few, is acquired with difficulty (vix) and after a long time and not without a mixture of doubts and errors (C. Gent., I, 4; III, 39).
According to St. Thomas "fere totius philosophiae consideratio ad Dei cognitionem ordinatur" (C. Gent., I, 4, 1; cf. In III Sent., d. 24, I, 3, sol. I). The first task is to distinguish, among the perfections found in creatures, those that are bound to the materiality of sensible substances as such, such as corporeity, sensibility, vegetative life and the like, which can in no way be attributed to God — mixed perfections; and the pure perfections, those that belong to the pure order of being and of spiritual life, such as truth, goodness, unity, beauty, intelligence, will, love, wisdom and the like, which not only do not conflict with God but must be attributed to him in the highest degree, because it is only in God that they find the purity of their own formal reason, whereas in creatures they have only a deficient and participated form. The attribution of these perfections to the divine essence is therefore intrinsically dialectical, because it implies two contrary moments, which generate a movement of the intelligence that here below always remains open. There is the first moment of affirmation, or attribution to God of the pure perfections as to their first and proper possessor; and there is the moment of caution, that is, of warning against anthropomorphism and immediate transpositions, insofar as one is warned that such perfections cannot exist in God in the same way in which they are found in creatures but in another way, namely in a way "proportioned" to the divine essence. Predication, to put it now in technical terms, is not made according to univocity but according to analogy (v.): it is in this moment of analogical predication that Thomist realism satisfies the nucleus of legitimate exigency that lies hidden in the reservations of agnosticism.
St. Thomas is here in agreement with the most distinguished masters of his thought. With Aristotle, according to whom "Scientia de Deo non est humana possessio" (In IV Sent., d. 49, 11, 7 ad 12, a free quotation of Met., I, 2, 983 [5-10]; cf. St. Thomas's commentary, lect. III, n. 64). With St. Augustine: "Sicut dicit Augustinus: Deus formam omnem intellectus nostri subterfugit" (In IV Sent., d. 49, 11, 1 ad 3, a vague citation of Epist. 147 [De videndo Deo etc.] 6-8: PL 33, 596 ff.). With the mysterious author of the book De causis, for whom: "Causa prima superior est omni narratione" (prop. v; ed. O. Bardenhewer, pp. 69-71). And above all with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whom St. Thomas, together with all his contemporaries, regarded as a disciple of the Apostle and whom in this subject of the "Divine Names" he chose as his principal master. And here are the principles of the doctrine of this profound theologian, recalled by St. Thomas somewhat everywhere in his works and gathered together in the commentary on the aforementioned proposition of the De causis (lect. VI). With the vivid sense of the divine transcendence that he had drawn from Neoplatonism, Pseudo-Dionysius affirms that in speaking of God "negations are more true than affirmations" (Coel. Hierarchia, ch. 2: PG 3, 141 A). The reason for this is to be seen in the fact that God does not make himself present in a manner adequate to any of our faculties: "neither to sense nor to imagination, nor to opinion, nor to discourse, nor to knowledge"; "God is at once ἀνώνυμος and πυλώνυμος" (Div. Nom., ch. 6: PG 3, 587 B; 595 D). More explicitly, in the version cited by St. Thomas:
« Si cognitiones omnes existentium sunt, et si existentia finem habent, in quantum scilicet finite participant esse; qui est supra omnem substantiam, ab omni cognitiones est segregatus » (Dio. Nom., ch. 6: PG 3, 594 A; cf. 587 D). So that one cannot be surprised when Dionysius affirms that man in this life « unitur Deo sicut omnino ignoto » (Myst. Theol., ch. 1: PG 3, 1101 A). It is useless to observe that the An-
…in his commentary on the De Divinis Nominibus, as in all his works, remains faithful to the spirit of this doctrine, giving it a more rigorous and scientific form: « Hoc est ultimum ad quod pertingere possumus circa cognitionem divinam in hac vita, quod Deus est supra omne id quod a nobis cogitari potest et ideo nominatio Dei quae est per remotionem, est maxime propria » (ch. 1, 1, 3, ed. Parm., vol. XV, 271 b). And in the Prologue to Sum. Theol. 1ª, q. 3: « Cognito de aliquo an sit, inquirendum restat quomodo sit, ut sciatur de eo quid sit. Sed quia de Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit: non possumus considerare de Deo quomodo sit, sed potius quomodo non sit » (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.) is grounded in Thomism in the principles indicated, which offer the key to deciphering in a positive sense the mystery of human existence and to drawing near to the immeasurable abyss of divine transcendence.