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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Aspects of religions (non-Christian) > Theology
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Theology and the Cartesian Doctrine of Freedom (Hardcover)
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Theology and the Cartesian Doctrine of Freedom (Hardcover)
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Theology and the Cartesian Doctrine of Freedom, now for the first
time available in English, was Etienne Gilson's doctoral thesis and
part of a larger project to show the medieval roots of Descartes at
a time when the very existence of medieval philosophy was often
ignored. Young Descartes was sent to La Fleche, one of the Jesuits
schools that offered a complete philosophical program, and
Descartes would have had the same philosophical training as a
Jesuit. There is some controversy about the exact dates of
Descartes's stay at La Fleche and consequently about his philosophy
instructor. By Gilson's calculations Francois Veron taught
Descartes for three years. Veron eventually left the Jesuits to be
free to engage in extraordinarily aggressive anti-Calvinist
polemics. If anything, Veron's overbearing manner may have
contributed to Descartes antipathy toward Scholastic philosophy.
(Whatever Descartes's objections to its philosophy curriculum,
later in life he recommended la Fleche as the best school in
France.) Descartes,s great intellectual mission in life was not his
mathematics but his physics, which was understood as a part of
philosophy. We see him navigate the shoals of heated theological
and religious strife in his attempt to articulate the metaphysical
foundations (and in particular a philosophical vision of God) for
his physics or theory of nature. As a layman, he always pleaded
ignorance in technically theological matters. He presented himself
as a loyal Catholic, quite sincerely in the portrait Gilson paints.
Descartes certainly did not avoid controversial philosophical
positions. For example, he held that God has created eternal truths
rather than the latter being eternal participations in God's
essence, which seems to put in doubt the necessity of these truths.
Descartes took sides in the great seventeenth-century debate
between Thomists and Molinists on human freedom. Gilson presents a
Descartes influenced personally and intellectually by the
Augustinianism of the founder of the French Oratory, Cardinal
Pierre de Berulle, who encouraged Descartes in his intellectual
quest to renovate European intellectual life. De Berulle and his
disciple, the theologian Guillaume Gibieuf, rather than Thomism and
Scotism would have influenced Descartes. Still, we also meet a
Descartes determined to have his Principles of Philosophy adopted
as the textbook for the schools run by the Jesuits who had educated
him. Indeed, Descartes is somewhat opportunistic in reinventing his
theory of freedom to bring it closer to the Molinist doctrine held
by the Jesuits. Alas, the Jesuits had their own textbooks. This is
not Gilson's last work on the development of Descartes' thinking,
but the book already shows the engaging, vivid historian of thought
who would become world famous. As Gilson guides us through
Descartes' voluminous correspondence, the feelers he sends out
through his friend Marin Mersenne, his attempts to make peace with
the Jesuits, we feel we have lived in seventeenth-century French
intellectual circles
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