“These things are never merely theoretical, because men act the way they think.”
Building upon the ideas that he put forth in The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer’s Escape from Reason is a further plea to modern Christians to engage our degenerating culture in honest debate, to understand the thought forms that have insidiously crept into it, and to pit these newfangled worldviews against the unchanging Word of God. Schaeffer begins with Thomas Aquinas, who distinguished between the notions of “nature” and “grace” in the 13th century and follows this distinction through theology, philosophy, art, and culture, from the pre-Reformation through the Renaissance and up to the existentialists of the 20th century. Although I occasionally struggled to grasp a point here or there, or became confused when it seemed like he was explaining the same concepts in depth for a second time, and even disagreed with him on several points (or at least thought he misrepresents a few thinkers, based on my limited knowledge), Escape from Reason is very densely packed with earnest thought that is helpful in navigating the monolithic cultural worldview that has resulted from our virtual connectedness. As with The God Who Is There, it amazes me that Schaeffer wrote this over fifty years ago.
In order to aid the modern Christian in “speaking meaningfully to his own age,” Schaeffer attempts to address questions that everyone grapples with at some point in their lives—how to find meaning in life, how to determine its source, how to ascertain that we can know anything at all, the limits of reason. Just some light afternoon contemplation. The book is less than 100 pages long and so, if you truly desire to, it could be blazed through in a marathon sitting, although you’ll want to leave ample time for putting the book down and thinking.
Before he really gets into things, Schaeffer makes a strong distinction between the terms “rational” and “rationalistic.” The first concerns man’s ability to reason consistently; the second is a system of thought built out from man alone at its center. The distinction is important because, as he demonstrated in The God Who Is There and reiterates here, words with certain connotations can be used to twist meanings and insinuate or imply things that are simply not true. And so although these two words sound like they could be used interchangeably, they emphatically cannot. In fact, the thread that he follows through most of the book is the inevitable result of rationalism, which is the abandonment of rationality.
The early scientists also shared the outlook of Christianity in believing that there is a reasonable God, who had created a reasonable universe, and thus man, by use of his reason, could find out the universe’s form.
In trying to trace the thought of the past 800 or so years, Schaeffer starts with Thomas Aquinas, a seminal figure in Christian thought. He says, “In Aquinas’s view, the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. […] Out of this as time passed, man’s intellect was seen as autonomous.” A few sentences later, Schaeffer says that, because of Aquinas, philosophy became free, separated from revelation, i.e. one could take part in natural theology without a need for Scripture. I’m not exactly well-read on Aquinas (I’ve only read Edward Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide) such that I can offer an adequate defense. But one thing I am sure of is that he put immense effort into reconciling the thought of Aristotle with the teachings of Scripture, which is the revelation of God to man, which man is not capable of conjuring up on his own. It is clear that Aquinas held revelation in high regard and as a legitimate way of knowing the truth of God, whereas Aristotle, I’m fairly certain, did not. So maybe Aquinas opened the door to some of these developments, but it seems unfair how readily Schaeffer heaps so much of the blame onto such a crucial thinker in his own tradition.
After Aquinas and the introduction of this divide, Schaeffer traces the disconnect up through the ages, spending time with prominent philosophers—Kant, Rousseau, de Sade, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Barth, Sartre, Huxley (all thinkers who I’ll dig into in earnest at some point, hopefully)—while taking some side trails into the realms of painting, literature, and cinema. His basic postulation is that man has become increasingly distant from rational truth, which has led to a complete separation between man and any legitimate attempt at a unified field of knowledge, and “thus art and science themselves soon began to be meaningless.” This abandonment of the pursuit of unity of thought has led to despair, but since this drift has been long, unconscious and subtle, we’re still left grasping for things that the newfound rationalism does not allow. This is why so many have settled for Christianity as a “leap of faith,” others have taken to drug-induced experiences, and still others have fallen into a vague mysticism of searching for transcendental moments that they cannot explain in the aftermath.
Once the historic Christian answer is put away, all we can do is to leap upstairs and say that against all reason God is good.
I think Schaeffer’s general reaction to thought trends is largely correct, but some minor errors crop up that stem from his cursory reading of certain artists and thinkers. So I read what he says specifically with a wary eye, but I more readily accept his conclusions about the trends in various fields. He frequently elucidates his points with examples. One that struck me as particularly salient is the non-thinking Christian’s tendency to fall into a trap of putting “faith in faith.” That is to say, if one starts from a rationalistic framework, building out from himself, he will have to put everything regarding Christianity in his “upper story” (an idea he introduces in The God Who Is There). But to do so dismisses the real historical events that happened in time and space and strips us of the method for rationally ascending to the upper story. The urgency of his appeal is most aptly illustrated by pointing to the chasm in communication that exists and is growing worse between parents, who hold onto some semblance of a God-centered worldview, and their children, whose education has been increasingly entrusted to the state, which increasingly instills a skeptical, relativist, subjectivist worldview. This is even worse now, a half century later, when those children Schaeffer was concerned about are now grandparents.
When one starts reasoning from themselves via rationalism, they can only encounter particulars—there is no hope of universals. This in turn leads to a lack of purpose and meaning, which leads to despair. In this circumstance, reason itself is easily abandoned and literally anything can be thrown into the “upper story” as a temporary balm for one’s angst—here Schaeffer even describes how the word “Jesus” separated from the historical understanding of the man has become meaningless and is actually a danger to the true Jesus of the Bible. He even takes aim at some films that I enjoy from the likes of Ingmar Bergman (The Silence), Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up), Fellini (Juliet of the Spirits), and Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), using them as creative examples in which man has no mechanism by which to authenticate himself because God is either not there or not personal, and mere chance is the dictator of fate. These compare with the book of Ecclesiastes, in which King Solomon considers his life “under the sun” (without God) and the meaninglessness of his existence; although Solomon’s conclusion is not to despair, but to realize that serving God is the only proper response that man can give.
As I alluded to earlier, Schaeffer has a tendency to speak in black and white terms when he’s walking us through the historical development of thought. I think that he frequently mischaracterizes the output of specific thinkers and artists in order to make his point, even when that individual has contributed a lot of positive work as well (e.g. if you didn’t know who Thomas Aquinas was before reading this you probably wouldn’t want to go read his work!). But it is hard to deny that his reading of the trends is accurate. Patchy in its history, but astute in its observation of the current landscape (and it’s still currently applicable, even though Schaeffer died four decades ago). At the very least, it’s an encouragement to engage with the current thought-trends that dominate our modern thinking and learn to communicate intelligently about them.