August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 51First Believe, Then Understand
Peter Adamson reviews the relation of reason & revelation.
that his method had something in common
with that of Aquinas. Śaṅkara explicitly
denied that the single source of everything,
brahman, can be known directly through
human resources. Any knowledge we our-
selves derive depends on sense-perception
and other instruments of cognition, and
these can never grasp brahman, for brahman
is without any distinguishing characteris-
tics: it’s a kind of unchanging transcendent
consciousness without defined properties.
Therefore we know of brahman only
through the scriptures. But once we do
know it, we can use rational argumentation
to understand more fully how brahman
relates to the world as it’s experienced –
whose reality Śaṅkara puts in doubt.
Employing analogies from everyday life
alongside constant citations from the
Upaniṣads,Śaṅkara suggests that the reality
of any effect resides in the principle from
which it arose, like the pot that came from
and consists in nothing but clay. Just so, our
world of experience has its origin in brah-
man and has no reality distinct from that
origin. Śaṅkara also uses rational argument
to defeat rivals, both within the Vedic tradi-
tion and outside it. He appeals to other
Hindu readers with a combination of exe-
gesis and proof, defending his non-dual
theory as being plausible in both interpre-
tive and philosophical terms. And he offers
a withering criticism of Buddhist philoso-
phy, which is opposed to Ved ānta since the
Buddhists reject the reality of the self.
Finally, he considers potential objections to
the non-dual theory, and meets them with
counter-refutation.
For Śaṅkara as for Anselm and Aquinas,
a proper understanding of things is
unattainable without the proper use of
reason. But a proper use of reason is
unattainable without religious commit-
ment. It is the Vedas, or the Bible, that give
us the truth, and the ‘scientist’s’ job is to
understand that truth.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2019
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1, 2
& 3, available from OUP. They’re based on his
popular History of Philosophy podcast.S
ince the seventeenth century or so,
European thought has been
increasingly shaped by the idea that
science and religion are opposed.
Enlightenment philosophers and their
heirs have mostly striven to align their dis-
cipline with science and distance it from
religion. Once the handmaid of theology,
now philosophy is often the handmaid of
neuroscience or particle physics. So perva-
sive now is the notion that religious belief is
independent from, or even diametrically
opposed to, scientific inquiry, that it can be
hard for us to appreciate older ways of
seeing the relationship between reason and
revelation. But let’s try.
One major way of thinking about it was
laid down by St Augustine (354-430):
‘Believe in order to understand’ (crede ut
intelligas). We mere humans should
depend on revealed truths in our thinking
to ensure that we do not go astray in spiri-
tual matters; but that dependence certainly
did not rule out rational argumentation.
Indeed the Augustinian slogan was quoted
by Anselm just before he presented the
most famous rational demonstration in all
medieval philosophy, his ontological argu-
ment for the existence of God. As jarring as
this attitude might be to us given our post-
Enlightenment attitudes, it is not that hard
to understand. After all, it’s one thing to
believe that God exists or that Christ died
for our sins, another to understand exactly
what these doctrines mean, and yet some-
thing else to understand all they may
imply. Reason may still have much to con-
tribute, even once faith has had its say.
This point was made in more rigorous
terms by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). He
would have been astonished by the modern
notion that religious belief is fundamentally
irrational. To the contrary: truth, including
religious truth, comes from God, and God
is perfectly rational. Exploiting what seems
to English speakers to be an ambiguity of
the Latin word scientia (knowledge), he said
that the theology of sacred science ( scientia)
derives from the higher understanding ( sci-
entia) of God. So for Aquinas no human sci-
ence is more ‘scientific’ than theology, eventhough, or rather precisely because, it rests
upon divine revelation.
Actually, Aquinas thought that unaided
human reason can establish certain funda-
mental truths of Christianity, notably that
there does exist one perfectly good,
infinitely powerful God. But other doc-
trines of the faith cannot be proven with
merely human powers. Rational proof was
impossible in such cases as the incarnation,
transubstantiation and the Trinity. You
can’t prove that God became a man, that
bread becomes flesh, or that one God is
three Persons, the way you can prove a
theorem of mathematics or physics. Yet
reason has its part to play in understanding
these doctrines too. We can at least estab-
lish that they involve no impossibilities,
thus refuting some criticisms from mem-
bers of the other Abrahamic religions. And
we can come to a deeper understanding of
the doctrines, for instance by applying
Aristotle’s analysis of relational properties
to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. So on
Aquinas’s telling, far from being irrational
theology is the richest and most powerful
application of reason, just because it draws
on the additional resources of revelation.
Aquinas’s particular way of describing
the relationship between religion and
reason was culturally specific – a negoti-
ated settlement between Augustinian the-
ology and Aristotelian philosophy. But in
its broad outlines his solution can also be
found in other times and places. Take for
example Śaṅkara, a leading exponent of
the Indian school of Ved ānta, who lived in
the eighth century AD. Śaṅkara likewise
represented a tradition of philosophical
engagement with scripture, in his case
with the ancient Vedas and the Hindu lit-
erature they inspired, especially the
Upaniṣads but also such texts as the Bha-
gavad G ītā. His distinctive contribution
was to put forward a ‘non-dual’ (advaita)
or monist theory, according to which
brahman, the divine origin of all things, is
in fact the only real thing. Brahman is also
identical with the individual self.
My goal here is not to explain Śaṅkara’s
teaching (thank goodness), but to point outPhilosophy Then
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