Theological Origins of Modernity

186 chapter six
by winter and forced to put up in a small German village where he began
to meditate.
It is important to understand the scene Descartes unfolds. He is a young
soldier idled by winter just before the beginning of the most cataclysmic
event of his age. He is alone, sitting in a stove-warmed room looking out
his window. Outside is a medieval German village, a collection of houses
that have been built and added onto over the years, set together in haphazard
fashion without any guiding principle of organization. Th e same
is true of the political world around him. It too is the product of innumerable
individual and uncoordinated decisions, driven not by reason or
by any methodological use of intelligence. Th ere is an emperor who rules
this world, but at the very moment Descartes is meditating he has been
(presumptuously) rejected by many of his subjects because he (presumptuously)
attempted to suppress their religion. Like politics, religion too
is governed by multiple confl icting and confusing rules written by those
who, as he tells us at the beginning of the Discourse, are convinced that
they have all of the good sense they need. Is it any wonder that his fi rst
thought is that “there is not usually so much perfection in works composed
of several parts and produced by various diff erent craft smen as in
the works of one man.” 67 It hardly needs to be added that he means a man
who has good sense. Th e chaos of the world around him is evidence of a
long history of men acting presumptuously without good sense or at least
without a uniform method for employing the good sense they have to arrive
at the truth.
Descartes gives a series of examples to illustrate his point, comparing
buildings patched together by several people with those designed by a single
architect, cities that have developed hodgepodge from mere villages
with planned towns, peoples grown together from a savage state living
only according to a haphazard law of precedents with peoples such as the
Spartans who have a wise lawgiver at the very beginning, religions whose
articles are made by men with those laid down by God himself, and fi nally
a science that is a mere accumulation of the opinions of various persons
with one devised by a single man of good sense employing simple reasoning.
All, he argues, demonstrate the superiority of the governance of a
single mind when it is guided by good sense.
Th e choice of these examples is hardly accidental. In fact, they are part
and parcel of Descartes’ rejection of Aristotelianism. Th e series of examples
he employs mimics the account of knowing Aristotle develops in the
sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle argues there that there is
an unbridgeable divide between practical knowledge, which is concerned