I AM, Therefore I Think… My Rejoinder To Descartes

By JOHN G. BOULET, MD

(Editor’s Note: Dr. Boulet is a pediatric emergency room physician. He notes that his father, a World War II ace fighter pilot who was a POW in Germany, was a longtime Wanderer reader.)

• + + René Descartes’ Cogito Ergo Sum expresses succinctly the approach to reality that gained ground in the early Middle Ages and which to this day defines modernity: “Descartes’ status as the father of modern philosophy is almost unquestioned,” according to Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker’s Politicizing the Bible (Crossroad Publishing [2013], p. 259).
  The crisis of modernity — the repudiation of the Divinity; the ennui ending in despair; the loss of any sense of identity of mankind and purpose to our existence other than pursuit of individual pleasure — does not originate quite with Descartes, but he brought it to fruition by his “method” of skepticism, invariably leading to cynicism, regarding the ability to know divine truths; and to the utter despair that characterizes modern man’s crisis, which is in effect “the abolition of man” (C.S. Lewis).
  The modernist mindset, if honest, must admit that the supposed elevation of reason over Revelation is in fact a deception, because in the absence of divine Revelation, “reason” can talk itself into any outcome that the will desires. It is bestial will which superintends reason, falsifying it, for the purpose of gaining power to satisfy the passions. Nietzsche’s “will to power” — your passions make your reason into nonsense for the purpose of the pursuit of self. Aggrandizement of ego, and the relentless indulgence of oneself in the pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself.
  Descartes’ skeptical (inevitably cynical) assertion — “cogito, ergo sum,” which really means that one imposes upon reality one’s own will — is the germ of the error of modernity condemned so beautifully by Pope St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (September 8, 1907).
  This declaration in effect that there is no truth outside of our individual minds — or, more accurately, outside our own wills, is also refuted by Pope St. John Paul II in Splendor Veritatis. There is truth, and it exists independently of our perceptions; and our failure to acknowledge this is an act of hubris, in which we arrogate to ourselves the determination of all truth.
  This “cogito, ergo sum” is, therefore, progenitor of the dictatorship of relativism spoken of by Cardinal Ratzinger upon the opening of the conclave in 2005 that elected him Pope: “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
  The problem with “cogito, ergo sum” is existential; it speaks to mankind’s decision to define ourselves on our terms; to claim a “right” to “grasp” “salvation on my terms” — or “not at all.” The latter is the likely outcome, of course, for the portion of humanity who are self-asserting, self-righteous; who claim to see and therefore are in fact blind, as Jesus said (John 9:41). It is the very antithesis of God-like living.
  Reality, in fact, is not what we try to make it into for our own egos and pleasure; and all of the calamities of history stem from this error. It is, in a very real sense, the “Non serviam” that the Prophet Jeremiah places onto the lips of rebellious Israel (Jer. 2:20).
  “I think, therefore I am” is, in fact, no more than creating oneself as one’s own god — the very temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed in the Garden of Eden when they chose to mistrust God, and to grasp the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:3-7). Adam and Eve committed the primal sin of grasping, of self-assertion, of self-deifying — the very opposite of the total self-giving that is the Heart of the Triune God’s inner life.
  Indeed, Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body is in large measure founded upon the insight that Adam and Eve’s sin was at heart “grasping” at the “tree,” succumbing to the temptation that instead of settling for “dominion” that God granted them in the Garden (Gen. 1:28), they would grasp at “domination” — at the tyrannical impulse which is forever opposed to Love — the “proto-” will to power espoused so many millennia later by one Friedrich Nietzsche.
  The “reason” given for disobeying God by eating of the forbidden fruit as delineated in Genesis is multifold: that God is lying to them and not to be trusted; and that the fruit is “good for food” and “was to be desired to make one wise”; so that Eve’s “reasoning” faculty is made to obey her passion; and likewise, then, Adam’s. This is the primordial “will to power,” at the dawn of humanity; the desire to make reality into one’s own image, a servant to one’s passions.

He First Loved Us

To an age of cynicism rooted in a faux-rationalistic rejection of any knowledge but that which is empiric and founded in the rejection, a priori, of even the possibility of the miraculous — of disbelief in even the possibility of divine Revelation beyond our powers of reasoning, of sublime truth, and most certainly of the Divine Truth of the Person of Jesus Christ:
I offer my rejoinder:
“I AM; therefore, i (lower-case ‘i’) think!” “SUM, ergo cogito” is truth.
It is the Lord God Who is existence itself: “I AM WHO AM” (Exodus 3:14) is the Who who defines that “we” exist at all. There is no “we” without the prior “I AM.” John the Evangelist carries this to its logical conclusion: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the expiation for our sins….We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:10 and 4:19).
The “I AM” of Exodus 3:14 is the origin of the term name Yahweh, or YHWH, “which is connected with the verb hayah, ‘to be’,” per the footnote in the RSV-CE edition of the Bible. Existence itself derives from this: the personal identity of the Creator; it derives not from mysterious atoms and quarks and quantum force fields — whatever they are.
All that exists, all personal identity, any and all assertions that we humans have to any identity at all beyond the illusory, is tied up in the assertion — nay, the fact — of the existence, not just of “a” god, but of THE God who is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28 [Douay-Rheims].) And it is only our existence as derived from His existence as a personal being that we are ever-able even to assert our “I”; that the existence of our very being, of our ability even to use the personal pronoun “I” in reference to ourselves, is possible.
And this existence is not the cold and impersonal “god” of science and reason and Descartes’ “method” of knowing. No! Existence is personal, and inherently interpersonal, made in the image and likeness of the Triune, personal, interpersonal God of all. All of reality is personal, and all of life — all mundane details of our day-to-day living, every “farthing” (Matt. 5:26; Luke 12:59) — therefore has spiritual, everlasting imprint on our own eternal identity — either Heaven or Hell.
“I AM WHO AM,” or “It is what it is”: is the contest lived out within all our hearts — that we are invited to embrace the Love Who is God, and to abjure living our lives as though we are nothing more than automatons, nothing more than bags of particles jostling about because of some sort of “big bang” 13 plus billions of years ago. (The universe is pedagogical in that way, but that is a discussion for another day.)

A Happy Lot

The choice could not be clearer: to live as though we are in fact no more than impersonal quarks and particles and force fields (whatever “force fields” are — who knows? certainly not physicists; and not René Descartes, by whose “mathesis universalis” he proposed to unify all knowledge) — indeed, as though the personal “we” do not exist and that consciousness and free will are illusory.
Or, to live in the joy of the knowledge that God does exist, and that reality is personal, that reality is like the Trinity in His own inner life, and we are made in His image and likeness — that reality is in fact interpersonal; and that we are in fact incomplete in ourselves precisely because we are not in fact automatons or marionettes or puppets, but made in the very image of the interpersonal, tri-personal God, in whom we “live and move and have our being” (St. Paul at the Areopagus in Athens, Acts 17:28). Not only as “members of one another” (Romans 12:5; 1 Cor. 12: 27), but pre-eminently as members of the Body of Christ.
It is only because of the “I AM” that we are even able to say, “I think.” If there were no “I AM,” then there would be no “I” to think, but just a mindless collection of particles and force fields with the illusion of free will.
Only the ever-eternal God Himself is the fount of any true knowledge of who we are, of who men are; it is only in coming to know God that we can know anything of the glorious destiny to which we are called, and can bring joy to our vale of tears, which otherwise devolves inevitably into the incomprehensible chaos of the black holes of self into which we descend, as though descending through the circles of Hell envisioned by Dante Alighieri — which is our fate when we reject the extended hands of Jesus upon His “throne” — i.e., His cross; where He enters into glory (John 3:14).
Faith — faith in the God who is personal — and in His having walked among us in the very tangible person of Jesus — only faith can rescue us from the Hell of eternally being lost in ourselves.
And faith in turn always has its origin only in Love. For God loved us first, so that we can love — “We love, because He loved us” (1 John 4:19), and “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
And all of us who live and breathe are touched moment by moment with the tangible, visible pedagogy of wondrous, mundane existence — invited every day by Love Himself to reach out our hands to Him, or even just a sliver of faith as in the barely outstretched finger of Adam as portrayed in the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.
We choose — each of us — to accept or to reject the proffered hand of God; to accept His offer of life eternal, sharing in His divinity (2 Peter 1:4). Or to drown in the black hole of Descartes’ self-asserting “Cogito,” from which no true meaning in life can derive.
We who are gratuitous recipients of the Baptism of Love granted to us by the community of believers in the revelation of the reality of the identity of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity come down to Earth to offer the friendship of God — we lucky few, we happy few, we band of brothers (Shakespeare’s Henry V speech on St. Crispin’s Day) — have no currency with the age of modernity’s grasping, self-asserting, self-deifying, Cartesian pseudo-reality that rejects the actual Ground of all reality.
Ours is a happy lot, ours is a joy that the world cannot take from us: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” (John 14:27).