and

an Explanation of the Quicunque Vult

As you read the following work it is important to ask yourself the following questions:

What is metaphysics?

What are the goals of metaphysics?

What are Aristotle’s presuppositions regarding nature?

What are the Judeo-Christian presuppositions regarding nature?

How effective are these two sets of presuppositions as a foundation for the investigation of  ontology?

How did the paradigm shift initiated by the monotheistic presuppositions affect our scientific development?

Why are these metaphysical presuppositions so influential in our thought process?

What is the writer trying to demonstrate about the differences between our current knowledge base and that of the classical civilization?

From: An Autobiography by R. G. Collingwood

 Chapter VII; The History of Philosophy: Metaphysics

It became clear to me that metaphysics (as its very name might show, though people still use the word as if it had been ‘paraphysics’) is no futile attempt at knowing what lies beyond the limits of experience, but is primarily at any given time an attempt to discover what the people of that time believe about the world’s general nature; such beliefs being the presuppositions of all their ‘physics', that is, their inquiries into its detail. Secondarily, it is the attempt to discover the corresponding presuppositions of other peoples and other times, and to follow the historical process by which one set of presuppositions has turned into another.

 

The question what presuppositions underlie the 'physics' or natural science of a certain people at a certain time is as purely historical a question as what kind of clothes they wear. And this is the question that metaphysicians have to answer. It is not their business to raise the further question whether, among the various beliefs on this subject that various peoples hold and have held, this one or that one is true. This question, when raised, would always be found, as it always has been found, unanswerable; and if there is anything in my ‘logic of question and answer’ that is not to be wondered at, for the beliefs whose history the metaphysician has to study are not answers to questions but only presuppositions of questions, and therefore the distinction between what is true and what is false does not apply to them, but only the distinction between what is presupposed and what is not presupposed. A presupposition of one question may be the answer to another question. The beliefs which a metaphysician tries to study and codify are presuppositions of the questions asked by natural scientists, but are not answers to any questions at all. This might be expressed by calling them ‘absolute’ presuppositions.

 

But the statements which any competent metaphysician tries to make or refute, substantiate or undermine, are themselves certainly true or false; for they are answers to questions about the history of these presuppositions. This was my answer to the rather threadbare question ‘how can metaphysics become a science?’ If science means a naturalistic science, the answer is that it had better not try. If science means an organized body of knowledge, the answer is: by becoming what it always has been; that is, frankly claiming its proper status as an historical inquiry in which, on the one hand, the beliefs of a given set of people at a given time concerning the nature of the world are exhibited as a single complex of contemporaneous fact, like, say, the British constitution as it stands to-day; and, on the other hand, the origin of these beliefs is inquired into, and it is found that during a certain space of time they have come into existence by certain changes out of certain others.

 (An Autobiography Chapter VII. The History of Philosophy pp. 66-67)  

 

 

From: An Essay on Metaphysics

by R. G. Collingwood

XXI

 

 QUICUNQUE VULT

 

If Aristotle’s account of the presuppositions underlying natural science as he understood it are compared with those of modern European science, certain points of agreement and certain points of difference will be found. I will begin with the most important points of agreement.

 

I. That there is one God; in other words, that there is one world of nature with one system of laws running all through it, and one natural science which investigates it.

II. That there are many modes of God’s activity; in other words, that the oneness of nature does not preclude, it logically implies, the distinction of many realms within nature, and the oneness of natural science does not preclude, it logically implies, distinctions between many departmental sciences.

 

This solves the ‘problem of the one and the many’. The solution in terms of religion is not to be found in a polytheism which asserts a diversity, however harmonious, of departmental gods; it can only be found in a monotheism which regards the one activity of the one God as a self-differentiating activity. This solution has the minor drawback, if you think it a drawback, that although you can quite well understand how a single activity differentiates itself into various activities (Plato had already made this clear when he showed that the four ‘virtues’ of temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice were differentiations of one single ‘virtue’ which includes them all, so that a man is properly called ‘good’ not because he is either temperate or brave or wise or just but because he is alike temperate and brave and wise and just) you cannot personify this in sculpture or painting or poetry; so that people who fancy they cannot understand a thing unless they can see it mythologically represented in a picture will fancy they cannot understand this. When a sculptor, for example, wishes to express the idea that the divine activity is one, he will personify it in a single human figure invested with conventional attributes of divinity:  when he wishes to express the idea that this one activity diversifies itself into many activities, he will personify it in a group of figures, rather comic to an irreverent eye, appearing to represent a committee of perhaps strangely assorted gods. An unintelligent spectator will think that there is inconsistency here, and will complain that he cannot tell whether monotheism or polytheism is being expounded.

 

There are at least two points, however, where Aristotle’s account of his own presuppositions fails to agree with the presuppositions of modern natural science. When these points are examined it will be seen that Aristotle was not so much failing to anticipate the absolute presuppositions of a future age as failing correctly to define his own.

 

III.  When Aristotle says that God did not create the world, this means that the existence of nature is not a presupposition of natural science but simply an observed fact. For if it had been said that God created nature, this would have meant that the existence of nature is a presupposition of natural science; since God is such a presupposition, and any activity which we ascribe to God is an integral part of what we believe about Him, and therefore when we presuppose Him we simultaneously presuppose anything which we regard as the product of His activity. 

 

Aristotle thought, and he was not the only Greek philosopher to think it, that by merely using our senses we learn that a natural world exists. He did not realize that the use of our senses can never inform us that what we perceive by using them is a world of things that happen of themselves and are not subject to control by our own art or any one else’s. I have already pointed out that the existence of such a world is a presupposition, the first and fundamental presupposition, on which alone any science of nature can arise. When Aristotle described it as a fact discovered by the use of the senses, therefore, he was falling into a metaphysical error. For his own science of nature, no less than for any other, the thing was in fact an absolute presupposition. This metaphysical error was corrected by Christianity. 

 

If metaphysics is our name for the statement of absolute presuppositions, and if metaphysics and theology are the same, there are three ways in which the existence of a world of nature might be made to figure among the doctrines of theology.

 

1. It might be a proposition in metaphysics, as it is for Spinoza, that God and nature are the same. But this would entail the consequence that natural science is the same thing as metaphysics: which cannot be right if the business of metaphysics is to state the absolute presuppositions of natural science.

 

2. It might be a proposition in metaphysics that the world of nature exists, but this proposition might be left wholly unrelated to the proposition that God exists. But then it would not be a proposition in theology; and therefore, if theology and metaphysics are the same, not a proposition in metaphysics.  And what about the presupposition of which it was the statement? The act by which we hold such presuppositions, I have said elsewhere, is religious faith; and God is that in which we believe by faith; therefore all our absolute presuppositions must be presuppositions in holding which we believe something about God.

 

3. It might be a proposition in which the existence of the world of nature was stated in the form of an attribute or activity of God; and this seems the only possible alternative.

IV. The second point of discrepancy between Aristotle’s metaphysics and the presuppositions of modern science is concerned with motion as a feature of the natural world.

 

Let it be granted that there is a natural world, no matter what our reasons for believing it. Greek and modern physics are agreed that the most universal characteristic of this world is motion. Now, if we ask how we know that in the natural world there is such a thing as motion, the Greek answer is that we know it by using our senses. That is how we know that there are natural things; that is likewise how we know that they move. But if the existence of natural things is not a fact discovered by experience but a presupposition without which we could never convert the data of experience into a science of nature, the idea that these things move must be a part of that same presupposition. For when we speak of the existence of natural things we mean (as Aristotle very truly says) the existence of things that move of themselves or events that happen of themselves. The idea of movement or happening, and self-movement or automatic happening at that, is contained in the idea of a natural world. The idea of motion, therefore (for if the world of nature is a world of bodies all the events in nature are motions), cannot be an idea which we obtain, as the Greeks thought we obtained it, through the use of our senses. It is an idea which we bring with us in the shape of an absolute presupposition to the work of interpreting what we get by using our senses. The proposition that there is motion in nature is a metaphysical proposition.

 

How could this proposition be incorporated in a theology? Obviously by saying that God, when he created the world of nature, set it in motion. The other alternatives, (1) that God is nature and that the movement of nature is God’s activity of self-movement, and (2) that science involves this presupposition among others, that natural things move, have been in principle already considered and rejected. But if we say that God set the world in motion when he created it, we are saying that his thus setting in motion that world he created is an integral part of his creating it, and therefore arises out of something in his essential nature. Aristotle did not think that movement, as such, in the natural world arose out of anything in God’s nature; he thought it happened of itself. He only thought that the orderliness or regularity or “rationality” of such movement arose from something in God’s nature, namely from the rationality of God’s thought, which things in nature imitated. But if we drop the idea of natural movements as first (logically first, of course) occurring of themselves, and only secondly acquiring their orderliness through imitating God, and substitute the idea of these movements as created by God, we are saying in effect that to be the creator of movement in the natural world is just as much a part of God’s nature as to be the source of diversified orderliness in the natural world.

 

Here again, it will be seen, Aristotle failed in his metaphysical analysis; and his failure was not limited to himself alone; the metaphysical mistake which he made was a commonplace of Greek thought. And since metaphysics is inseparable, as regards success or failure, from ordinary thinking, this breakdown of Greek metaphysics implied a breakdown of Greek science.

 

This was very clearly seen by the Patristic writers, who made all the four points I have enumerated, consciously and deliberately emphasizing their importance for natural science. I will go over the points in a slightly different order.

 

I. There is one God.   Here they agreed with the philosophical tradition of the Greeks, and also with the prophetic tradition of the Hebrews, which resembled it in asserting a monotheistic religion against a background of popular polytheism.

 

II. God created the world.   Here they accepted the Hebrew tradition and departed from the Greek. For Plato, God is not the creator of the world, he is only its “demiurge”; that is to say, he made it, but made it on a pre-existing model, namely the eternal hierarchy of Forms. For Aristotle, he did not even make it; he is only the model on which it tries to make itself.

 

In order to understand what the Christian metaphysicians were doing, and why the thing they did was ultimately accepted by the Greco-Roman world, in other words why that world was converted to Christianity, it is necessary to bear in mind that at this point they were correcting a metaphysical error on the part of the Greek philosophers. I have already explained that the article of faith 'God created the world' meant 'the ideal of a world of nature is an absolute presupposition of natural science'. In maintaining that article of faith, the Christians were substituting a correct piece of metaphysical analysis for the incorrect piece of metaphysical analysis whereby the Greek philosophers had been led to the doctrine that we learn of the natural world’s existence by the use of our senses.

 

III. The activity of God is a self-differentiating activity, which is why there are diverse realms in nature.   This doctrine was a blend of the foregoing with a notion which Christianity owed to the Greek philosophers. The notion of a self-differentiating unity was characteristically Platonic; and from Platonism it had already found its way into the Jewish Platonism of Egypt. The technical term in Greek for a self-differentiating unity is [         ], and this word was taken over by the Egyptian schools, and later by Christianity itself in the Fourth Gospel. Everybody knows Gibbon’s gibe to the effect that this notion was taught 300 B.C. in the school of Alexandria, revealed A.D. 97 by the Apostle St. John. Most people know, too, that Gibbon lifted this statement out of St. Augustine’s Confessions, characteristically omitting to acknowledge it and at the same time falsifying the facts by suppressing Augustine’s point, which is that the notion of the [         ] was a commonplace familiar to every Platonist, but that the Johannine doctrine according to which “the [         ] was made flesh” was a new idea peculiar to Christianity. ¹   

 

¹ Gibbon’s remark occurs in his table of contents to chapter xxi. “My personal acquaintance with the Bishop of Hippo”, he says in note 30 to chapter xxxiii (Bury’s ed., vol. iii, p. 607), “does not extend beyond the Confessions and the City of God.” Here is the passage from the Confessions, vii. 9: “et ibi [sc. in libris Platonicorum] legi non quidem his verbis, sed hoc idem omnino, multis et multiplicibus suaderi rationibus quod in principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum; hoc erat in principio apud Deum (and so on, quoting John i. 1 – 5, then omitting the reference to the Baptist and beginning again at verse 11). Quia vero in sua propria venit…(quoting verses 11 – 12) non ibi legi. Item ibi legi…..(quoting verse 13) sed quia verbum caro factum est…(quoting verse 14) non ibi legi.” The extreme care with which Augustine details every point in which the Evangelist is merely repeating the commonplaces of current Platonism throws into sharp relief the points in which he claims that the Christian doctrine departs from the Platonic; and makes one regret the slipshod way in which Gibbon speaks of Plato as having “marvellously anticipated one of the most surprising discoveries of the Christian revelation”.  

 

IV. The creative activity of God is the source of motion in the world of nature. This, like number II, was a departure from Greek precedents and a point borrowed from the Hebrew creation-myth, where “the spirit (breath) of God moved upon the face of the waters”, and where God after modeling Adam out of clay “breathed into his nostrils the breath (spirit) of life”. God is pictured as blowing over the world he makes, thus setting it in motion; blowing into the living creature he makes, thus giving it power to move itself.

 

This point is logically connected with number II. If the world of nature is by definition a world of movements, and if the existence of that world is an absolute presupposition of natural science, the movement which is its essence must be an absolute presupposition too. Once it was seen that Greek natural science did in fact absolutely presuppose the existence of a natural world, although by an error in metaphysical analysis the Greek philosophers had overlooked the fact; and once the fact had been stated, strictly in accordance with the Aristotelian principle that metaphysics and theology are the same, by saying that the world of nature exists in virtue of a creative act on the part of God; it followed inevitably that this creative act should be defined as not merely (a) creative of nature in general, nor merely (b) creative of distinct realms in nature, but also as (c) creative of motion in nature.

 

When a Christian theologian to-day says that God exists, or (to be precise by making explicit the metaphysical rubric) that we believe in God, he is consciously using words in the sense in which they were defined by the Patristic writers who worked out the notions I have been describing. When an uneducated Christian makes the same statement, he too is using words in the same sense, unless indeed he is attaching to them some private and heretical (that is, historically unjustified) sense of his own. What the words do actually and historically mean is by now, I hope, clear. I will try to summarize it briefly, bearing in mind that I have undertaken to deal only with their application to the absolute presuppositions of natural science.

They mean that natural scientists standing in the Greek tradition absolutely presuppose in all their inquiries.

 

1. That there is a world of nature, i.e. that there are things which happen of themselves and cannot be produced or prevented by anybody’s art, however great that art may be, and however seconded by good luck.

 

2. That this world of nature is a world of events, i.e. that the things of which it is composed are things to which events happen or things which move.

 

3. That throughout this world there is one set of laws according to which all movements or events, in spite of all differences, agree in happening;and that consequently there is one science of this world.

 

4. That nevertheless there are in this world many different realms, each composed of a class of things peculiar to itself, to which events of a peculiar kind happen; that the peculiar laws of these several realms are modifications of the universal laws mentioned in 3; and that the special sciences of these several realms are modifications of the universal science there mentioned.

 

Christian writers in the time of the Roman Empire asserted, and no historian to-day will deny, that in their time the science and civilization of the Greco-Roman world were moribund. Some modern writers, purveyors of sensational fiction rather than historians, say that this was because the Greco-Roman world was being destroyed by barbarian attacks. The causes of historical events are sometimes clearer to posterity than to contemporaries; but not in a case like this. If man’s friends have left it on record that he died of a lingering disease, and a group of subsequent writers, in an age for which it is a dogma that no such disease exists, agreed to say that he was shot by a burglar, a reader might admit that the story told by posterity was more entertaining than that told by the contemporaries, without admitting that it was truer. The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilization ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease. The Greco-Roman world, we are told, was moribund from internal causes, specifically because it had accepted as an article of faith, as part of its 'pagan' creed, a metaphysical analysis of its own absolute presuppositions which was at certain points erroneous. If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered. But because metaphysical analysis is an integral part of scientific thought, an obstinate error in metaphysical analysis is fatal to the science with which it is concerned. And because science and civilization, organized thought in its theoretical and practical forms, stand or fall together, the metaphysical error which killed pagan science killed pagan civilization with it.

 

This diagnosis is naturally repugnant to an age like the present, when the very possibility of metaphysics is hardly admitted without a struggle, and when, even if its possibility is admitted, its importance as a conditio sine qua non of science and civilization is almost universally denied. Naturally, therefore, this anti-metaphysical temper has produced an alternative explanation for the collapse of the 'pagan' world; that it was destroyed by the barbarians. But this explanation cannot be taken seriously by anyone with the smallest pretensions to historical learning. A good deal of information about barbarians and Romans in the later Empire is now accessible to persons who profess no special interest in the subject; and any reader who will spend a little time upon it can satisfy himself that it was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world. Further research will convince him to this extent the Patristic diagnosis was correct: the 'pagan' world died because of its own failure to keep alive its own fundamental convictions.

 

The Patristic writers not only saw this, but they assigned to it a cause, and proposed a remedy. The cause was a metaphysical cause. The 'pagan' world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they said, because owning to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were. The remedy was a metaphysical remedy. It consisted, as they formulated it, in abandoning the faulty analysis and accepting a new and more accurate analysis, on the lines which I have indicated in this chapter.

 

This new analysis they called the 'Catholic Faith'. The Catholic Faith, they said, is this: that we worship (note the metaphysical rubric) one God in trinity, and trinity in unity, neither confounding the [     ] and thus reducing trinitarianism to unitarianism, nor dividing the [     ] and thus converting the one God into a committee of three. The three [    ], that is to say the three terms in virtue of whose distinctness they spoke of a trinity, they called respectively the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. By believing in the Father they meant (always with reference solely to the procedure of natural science) absolutely presupposing that there is a world of nature which is always and indivisibly one world. By believing in the Son they meant absolutely presupposing that this one natural world is nevertheless a multiplicity of natural realms.*  By believing in the Holy Ghost they meant absolutely presupposing that the world of nature, throughout its entire fabric, is a world not merely of things but of events or movements.

 

These presuppositions must be made, they said, by anyone who wished to be 'saved'; saved, that is to say, from the moral and intellectual bankruptcy, the collapse of science and civilization, which was overtaking the 'pagan' world. The disease from which that world was suffering they regarded as a fatal disease. A civilization is a way in which people live, and if the way in which the way people live is an impracticable way there can be no question of saving it. What has to be saved is not the way of living but the people who live in that way; and saving them means inducing them to live in a different way, a way that is not in impracticable. The different way of living which these writers proposed for adoption was the way of living based upon the absolute presuppositions I have tried, in a partial and one-sided manner, to describe. The new way of living would involve a new science and a new civilization.

 

The presuppositions that go to make up this 'Catholic Faith', preserved for many centuries by the religious institutions of Christendom, have as a matter of historical fact been the main or fundamental presuppositions of natural science ever since. They have never been its only absolute presuppositions; there have always been others, and these others have to some extent differed at different times. But from the fifth century down to the present day all these differences have played their changing parts against a background that has remained unchanged: the constellation of absolute presuppositions originally sketched by Aristotle, and described more accurately, seven or eight centuries later, by the Patristic writers under the name of the 'Catholic Faith'.

 

*This is why, as everybody knows who has ever looked at the sculptures of a French cathedral, the specialized creative work done on the Days of Creation is represented in medieval Christian art as being done not by the Father but by the Son. The second 'Hypostasis' of the Trinity is the [    ], the self-differentiation of the divine creative activity. 'Dieu a cree mais il a cree par son Verbe ou par son Fils. C'est le Fils est qui a realise la pensee du Pere, qui l'a fait passer de la puissance a l'acte. ...

Note to pp. 223-225. There may be readers who find strange or even shocking my denial of the vulgar error that Roman civilization was destroyed by barbarian attacks. In the text I remarked that this impression would be dispelled by looking up what modern writers have to say on the subject. Such readers can now be referred to an authoritative discussion of this very point in a book which has placed its author among the foremost living historians: A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. iv, pp. 56-63, published while this Essay was in the press.  

From:

 An Essay On Metaphysics

 by R. G. Collingwood, 1939

Revised Edition with

The Nature of Metaphysical Study

Function of Metaphysics in Civilization

Notes for an Essay on Logic

Edited with an Introduction by Rex Martin, 1992

pages 213-227

(What I call Collingwood's Philosophy of Religion)