Selected Works Cornelio Fabro, Volume 3: Selected Articles on Atheism and Freedom

By Cornelio Fabro

Selected Works of Cornelio Fabro Volume 3: Selected Articles on Atheism and Freedom, is the third volume of the English Selected Works of Cornelio Fabro. In addition to an introduction by Elvio Fontana of the Pontifical Urban University, this volume contains the following articles, published together for the first time: - Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. “Atheism.” 15th edition. Volume 2, 258–262. Heilen Hemingwai Benton Publisher, 1974. © 1974 by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Reprinted with permission. - New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Fichte, Johann Gottlieb.” 1st edition, 1967. 2nd edition, Volume 5, 708–709, Detroit: Gale, 2003. © 2003 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, Inc. Reproduced by permission. www.cengage.com/permissions. - “Theology in the Context of a Philosophy of Nothingness.” in Theology of Renewal: Proceedings of the Congress on Theology of Renewal of the Church, Centenary of Canada, 1867–1967, ed. Laurence K. Shook, vol. 1, Renewal of Religious Thought, 329–355. Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1968. - “The Problem of the Rights of Man in the Hebrew-Christian Tradition.” Round table Meeting on Human Rights, Oxford, UK, 1965. UNESCO/SS/HR/4. Paris: November 3, 1965. - “Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, Teacher of Christian Freedom.” The Irish Theological Quarterly, 47, no. 1 (March 1980): 56–60. - “Freedom and Existence in Contemporary Philosophy and in St. Thomas.” The Thomist 38, no. 3 (1974): 524–556. This volume also includes one work that has never before appeared in publication: the transcription of “Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Trends in Radical Freedom.” Visiting scholar lecture, Rockhurst College (now University), Kansas City, MO, February 24, 1974.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVE Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781545750872

Book preview

Atheism

Atheism | Fichte, Johann Gottlieb | Theology in the Context of a Philosophy of Nothingness

ATHEISM

Atheism is the denial of God as the first principle and is thus antitheism, the opposite of theism. The words atheist and atheism can be found as early as the works of Plato. In the Christian era, they recur in the Letter of Paul to the Ephesians and in the works of the Fathers of the Church, when for example, St. Ignatius of Antioch attacks the pagans, calling them atheists, and Justin Martyr defends the Christians, claiming that they adore the true God and thus are not atheists. Atheism is opposed to all religion or worship of God as indicated by the synonym for atheist: freethinker. To many of its theological critics, atheism is synonymous with impiety, irreligion, disbelief, and even moral corruption, on the ground that it rejects every principle and every higher ethical law.

DIVISIONS AND PRINCIPAL FORMS

Atheism can be divided into theoretical atheism and practical atheism. Theoretical atheism is the denial of God based upon a system of thought that excludes the possibility of the existence of the Absolute. Practical atheism is the denial of God as reflected in the way one conducts his private and public life, leaving the question of God out of consideration and basing one’s conduct solely on finite values.

Theoretical atheism

Theoretical atheism can be either negative or positive. Explicit negative theoretical atheism is attributed to those who unequivocally deny the existence of God and who suppose a concept of the world and of the destiny of man that radically excludes the necessity of the transcendent first principle or of the immortal human soul. Implicit negative theoretical atheism, or crypto-atheism, is attributed to those who, although they affirm the existence of God or of the Absolute, deprive him of some essential attribute. This type of atheism is also known as atheism by consequence. The encyclopaedia prepared by the 18th-century French philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert equates skepticism (which questions the ability of the human mind to know), indifferentism (which states that all religions are equally valid), and even agnosticism (which claims that the question of God’s existence cannot be answered) with negative atheism because they close off all the paths that lead to God.

Positive theoretical atheism, predominant in modern thought, replaces the acknowledgment of the transcendent first principle with the the autonomy of the subjective thinking element (the cogito) in man which leads him to identify knowledge with being (or reality), wisdom with action, and freedom with necessity; it substitutes the emergence of man in the world for the transcendence of God and personal immortality. Theoretical atheism, insofar as it is a vindication of the total autonomy and absolute freedom of man, is also called postulated atheism, in the sense that God cannot and must not exist if man is to be guaranteed freedom as well as responsibility over his duties and his actions. Positive atheism is thus an anthropological atheism in which God is replaced by man.

Practical atheism

Practical atheism consists in ignoring or neglecting all relation to God in one’s actions, that is, in living as though God does not exist. According to Paul, in his letter to Titus, this is the situation of those who claim to know God yet deny him with what they do. Practical atheism, therefore, involves the orienting of one’s life exclusively toward the attainment of earthly goals.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ATHEISM

The history of atheism is as complex and obscure as its notion. Atheism seems to have been unknown in the more primitive societies; it appears to be the fruit of civilization and of reflection. Although Plato expressly argues against atheists in the Laws and although some of the lists of men branded as radical atheists have been handed down, explicit atheists were rare in the period of ancient Greece and Rome and in the early Christian era.

During the Middle Ages, the time of great Christian expansion, explicit atheism was practically unknown. According to some Marxist historians, however, the medieval heresies and the controversies between the schools of thought, especially the arguments concerning the relationships between reason and faith and between freedom and authority, should be interpreted as preparations for modern atheism. The return to a classical, pagan conception of life with humanism and the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries gave vitality to the atheistic currents that did exist. The materialism of the ancient Greek philosophers Democritus and Epicurus and the syncretism of the Stoics and the Neoplatonists were fused into a theory that the world is self-contained and self-sufficient. The principal inventor and defender of the atheistic conception of the modern state was Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian statesman and author who died in 1527. In his most famous work, Il Principe (written 1513; Eng. trans., The Prince, 1954), he defended the principle that the end justifies the means, thus affirming the independence of politics from morality and, in the final analysis, from any form of religion.

Influence of Descartes

Atheism in its modern positive form has been characterized by the thought of the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who, in the first half of the 17th century, attempted to ground his thought on clear and distinct ideas and the proposition Cogito, ergo sum (I think; therefore, I am). He thus placed the foundation of truth in the evidence and in the freedom of the thinking subject. The Cartesian system is accused of being atheistic because of its mechanistic conception of the world, according to which all natural phenomena can be explained by reference to matter and motion and their laws. The first explicit argument defending atheism as moral, as being no worse than idolatry, as not leading to corruption or death, was formulated by Pierre Bayle, a late-17th-century Cartesian fideistic skeptic; his defense provided the foundation for modern secularism. At the same time, deism and British empiricism were inserted into the intellectual scene by John Locke, who advanced the hypothesis: whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter fitly disposed a power to perceive and think. This hypothesis became a categorical proposition for the French writer Voltaire and for the British freethinker John Toland, both of whom believed in the universal animation of matter and its self-sufficiency. These ideas were the central point of Enlightenment atheism as expressed chiefly by the French encyclopaedists and the British