Descartes: A Biography

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 Descartes: A Biography

college was Jacobus Revius (–), a theologian of such modest

ability that he is remembered now, if at all, as a poet rather than as a the-

ologian, or as one of the two unremarkable culprits identified by Descartes

as instigators of opposition to his metaphysics at Leiden.

At the time of his appointment, Heereboord seems to have been a

relatively competent Aristotelian philosopher, but one who also showed

early signs of intellectual independence. Among the disputations that he

arranged for his students, as Descartes acknowledged, was one in which

the validity of substantial forms was defended against the Cartesian crit-

icisms that were emanating at the time from Regius in Utrecht.How-

ever, while defending central features of the Aristotelian tradition, as it

was taught in Dutch universities at the time, Heereboord also strayed

into theses that sounded vaguely Cartesian, and some of them opened up

well-known problems about the relationship between religious faith and

reason. This was an issue that had troubled Calvinist theologians for some

time. Moise Amyraut, for example, had defended a radical view in

that acknowledged the privileged role of reason.

One way of understanding religious mysteries, such as the Trinity,

is to consider them intelligible claims for which, apart from revelation,

human beings lack supporting evidence. When understood in that way,

they are not inconsistent with reason. However, it is a much stronger

claim to suggest that religious mysteries cannot be understood at all, even

if they are revealed by God, and that religious faith requires Christians

not only to accept them without independent evidence but also to believe

something that they cannot even understand. Heereboord showed both

his independence and his Cartesian sympathies by supporting the first of

these two alternatives, in corollaries to a disputation on the role of reason

in philosophy.

. The principle from which one begins in philosophy is reason, mind, the natural

light of the human intellect, by means of principles that are naturally innate in the

human mind and through conclusions that are deduced from them or, in other words,

through innate and adventitious ideas.

. Those who ban the use of reason and mental reasoning from theology are mis-

taken because, in this case too, reason deduces conclusions from principles which are

revealed.

. Those who claim that the mysteries revealed by Holy Scripture must be held by

faith alone and not also by reason do not speak with sufficient accuracy.

. Nothing is held by faith unless it is also held by reason, because ‘reason’ means

that by which we know, not the source of our knowledge....