Concept

Ontologism

The nineteenth-century doctrine, mainly Catholic, that the mind's first and immediate object of knowledge is God — or being itself — so that all other knowing rests upon that ground.

A geometer who has never seen a perfect circle nonetheless judges every drawn circle against one, and finds them all wanting. The mind measures the things of sense by something the senses never delivered — a standard exact, unchanging, and the same for everyone who reasons rightly. For Augustine of Hippo this was not a curiosity but a proof. The eternal and immutable truths the mind grasps are not made by the mind and not gathered from bodies; they are seen in a light that is not the mind’s own. There is present within us, he wrote, the light of an eternal reason, and in that light the unchanging truths are beheld. The light is God’s. Ontologism is the doctrine that takes this seeing of truth in God and presses it all the way down: that the human mind knows God, or being itself, immediately and first — before and beneath every knowledge of particular things — so that every act of knowing whatever rests on that prior, mostly unnoticed contact with the divine. The name was coined in the nineteenth century, mainly by the doctrine’s critics, and the position it marks is overwhelmingly a Catholic one; but the intuition behind it is ancient. The light by which the mind sees anything at all is, in the end, the light of God.

Saint Augustine of Hippo seated in his study, gazing upward in thought Saint Augustine in His Study, fresco by Sandro Botticelli (1480), Church of Ognissanti, Florence; Augustine’s doctrine of divine illumination is the root of ontologism — Sandro Botticelli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Augustinian inheritance and its Neoplatonic root

Augustine’s divine illumination is itself the Christian recasting of an older picture. In Plotinus the Forms are not free-standing but are the contents of Nous, the divine Intellect, which shines with the light streaming from the One; the soul that turns inward and upward is illumined by that light and sees the intelligibles within it. The metaphor is Plato’s — the Good is to the things known as the sun is to the things seen — and Augustine kept it almost intact, moving the Forms into the mind of the Christian God and replacing recollection with illumination. The mind does not climb to the eternal truths by induction from the senses; it reads them off in a light infused from above. This is the seed. What the ontologists did was to make the seed the trunk: to argue that this illumined contact is not one special operation reserved for grasping necessary truths, but the condition of every cognition, the silent floor beneath all the rest. The notion of the infinite, the marks of necessity and eternity that cling to a universal idea — these cannot be drawn from finite, contingent, perishing things, and so, the argument runs, they can subsist only in God and be known only by an intuition of God present to the mind. To know anything as necessary is already, unawares, to have touched the necessary being.

Third-century Roman sarcophagus relief showing a seated reader surrounded by figures, traditionally identified as Plotinus and his disciples Roman sarcophagus relief (3rd century), traditionally identified as Plotinus and his disciples, Gregorian Egyptian Museum, Vatican; in Plotinus the soul is illumined from above and sees the intelligibles within — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Malebranche and the vision in God

The hinge between Augustine and the nineteenth century is Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), the Oratorian priest who fused Augustine’s illumination with the method of Descartes. His signature thesis, worked out in the third book of De la recherche de la vérité (The Search after Truth, 1674–75), is that the soul sees all things in God — nous voyons toutes choses en Dieu. The ideas by which the mind knows bodies are not modifications of the mind itself, nor little copies stored in it; they are God’s own ideas, the archetypes resident in the divine intellect, present to the mind that thinks. When one perceives a triangle or judges that two and two make four, one is reading in God. Malebranche guarded a distinction that the later quarrel would turn on, and it is his own, not a gloss imposed on him: the vision in God is not a vision of God. The mind does not gaze on the divine essence; it sees creatures through the intelligible reality that God contains and makes available, the way one sees an object by a light without staring into the source. His Jansenist antagonist Antoine Arnauld pressed exactly the charge that the system collapsed this guard — that to see all things in God is, willy-nilly, to claim a sight of God reserved for the blessed — and the polemic ran past Arnauld’s death in 1694. Rome was unpersuaded by the doctrine: the Traité de la nature et de la grâce was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1690, and the Recherche itself followed in 1709. Yet the core figure — the mind bathed in divine ideas and knowing the world by them — survived the censure and passed forward as the most articulate modern statement of the seeing-in-God that the next century would systematize.

Engraved portrait of the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche in clerical dress Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), the Oratorian priest whose thesis that the soul “sees all things in God” carried Augustinian illumination into the modern period — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Gioberti and the intuition of Being

The nineteenth-century ontologists took the Malebranchean picture and asked of it a sharper question: not merely how the mind knows eternal truths, but where all thinking starts. Their answer made the immediate contact with God the very first move of the intellect, the act on which logic, science, and metaphysics are all parasitic. The most famous formula belongs to Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852), the Piedmontese priest, philosopher, and statesman who served briefly as prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia during the upheavals of 1848–49 and whose Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (1843) made him a prophet of Italian national hope. In the Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (1840) he set out what he called the ideal formula: Ens creat existentias — Being creates existences. This is not a conclusion the mind reasons toward; it is a single intuitive judgment, the spontaneous first content of the intellect when Being presents itself. Being, for Gioberti, is the primum philosophicum, the first thing in the order of philosophy because it is first in the order of the mind and first in the order of what exists — the common ground of all reality and all knowledge. And this Being is God. The mind’s opening act, then, is an intuition of God as the creating source of existences, held directly though never comprehended: seen, not surveyed; touched, not encompassed.

Painted portrait of Vincenzo Gioberti Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852), Piedmontese priest and statesman, author of the ideal formula Ens creat existentias — Being creates existences — detail of a portrait by Antonio Puccinelli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Around the same intuition a kindred school grew up at the Catholic University of Louvain, where Gérard Casimir Ubaghs (1800–1875) taught for three decades a traditionalist ontologism — the idea that the human mind directly contemplates God in the objective ideas, married to the further claim that the great metaphysical and moral truths reach us through a primitive divine teaching handed down by tradition. His Essai d’idéologie ontologique (Louvain, 1860) gave the position its Belgian form. The French abbé L. Branchereau pressed similar theses in his Prælectiones Philosophicæ. Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855), the founder of the Institute of Charity, was repeatedly numbered among the ontologists for his doctrine of the idea of being innate in the mind, though his defenders have always insisted the placement is unjust and that his “ideal being” is not God but a divine illumination of a different and carefully limited kind. The dispute over whether Rosmini belongs in this company is the longest of the school’s afterlives, and it was settled in his favor only much later.

The reversal of the Thomist order

What the ontologists claimed was a specific and deliberate reversal of order, and its target was the dominant account inherited from Thomas Aquinas and revived across the nineteenth century by the Scholastic movement. On the Thomist view, human knowledge begins below, with the senses; the intellect abstracts the intelligible from the sensible particular, and reaches God only at the end, by inference — reasoning upward from creatures to the cause they require. God is known last, and mediately, never as the mind’s first datum. Aquinas grants, in a passage the ontologists were fond of citing, that we see all things in God and judge according to Him insofar as by a participation of His light we know and judge — for the natural light of reason is itself a certain participation of the divine light. But he means by this something the ontologists would not accept: the light is a created endowment of the soul, a derived power, not a window onto God’s own ideas, and he flatly denies that the merely natural man sees God. Ontologism turns the whole structure over. God, or being, is what the mind touches first — the condition that makes any other knowing possible, present and operative even when the knower never notices the touch. Where Thomism climbs from the world to God, ontologism begins in God and descends to the world. The two orders cannot both be the natural one, and the nineteenth century forced the choice.

Panel painting of Saint Thomas Aquinas holding a book and a model church, with a sunburst behind his head Saint Thomas Aquinas, panel from the Demidoff Altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli (1476), National Gallery, London; on the Thomist view the mind begins with the senses and reaches God only by inference — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The condemnation of 1861 and the Thomist settlement

The opponents’ objection was sharp and, in the end, decisive. To make the intuition of God the natural starting point of all human thought, they argued, was to confuse the order of knowing in this life with the beatific vision promised only in the next — to grant here, as a standing possession of every mind, the sight of God that Christian doctrine reserves for the blessed in glory. It risked collapsing the very distance between creature and Creator that the theology meant to keep. On 18 September 1861 the Holy Office addressed seven propositions drawn from the ontologists — concerning the immediate and innate knowledge of God, of being, and of the relation of finite things to God — and declared that they could not be safely taught: tuto tradi non posse. The first of them held that at least a habitual, immediate knowledge of God is so essential to the human intellect that without it the mind can know nothing, this knowledge being the intellectual light itself. The censure was not a definition of heresy but a prohibition, and it did its work. In 1862 the same congregation faulted fifteen propositions of Branchereau, two of which asserted an innate, direct perception of ideas and an intuition of God by the human mind; in 1864 Ubaghs’s Louvain teaching was censured, and he submitted. Rosmini’s case ran longest: a decree of 1887, published in 1888, condemned forty propositions taken largely from his posthumous works, several carrying the ontologist principle — though in 2001 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that Rosmini himself had not held the errors as the decree had read them, and he was beatified in 2007. After 1861 the school did not recover its standing. The current ran the other way: Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (4 August 1879) made the restoration of the philosophy of Aquinas the official charter of Catholic thought, and by the close of the century the Thomist account of knowledge — sense first, God by inference last — had become the settled frame of Catholic philosophy and the standard of its seminaries.

Photographic portrait of Pope Leo XIII seated in papal vestments Pope Leo XIII (1898), whose 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris made the philosophy of Aquinas the official charter of Catholic thought — Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The texts and the scholarship

The doctrine’s primary monuments are accessible in the original languages and, in part, in the public domain. Gioberti’s Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (Turin, 1840) is the founding statement of the ideal formula; his polemic against his nearest rival appears in Degli errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini (1841). The Malebranchean source stands behind them all: De la recherche de la vérité (1674–75), whose third book carries the vision-in-God, is digitized at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica, and the early English rendering, Father Malebranche His Treatise concerning the Search after Truth (Thomas Taylor, 1694; 2nd ed. 1700), is likewise out of copyright. The disciplinary history is best entered through the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article on Ontologism, which gathers the named figures — Malebranche, Gioberti, Ubaghs, Branchereau — and reproduces the framing of the 1861 censure; the texts of the condemned propositions are cataloged in Heinrich Denzinger’s Enchiridion symbolorum (numbers 1659–65 in the Bannwart numbering). For Rosmini, whose membership in the school remains the live scholarly dispute, the fullest treatment is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Antonio Rosmini, which sets the Post obitum decree of 1887 beside the 2001 ruling that exonerated him. Cornelio Fabro’s Introduzione all’ateismo moderno (1961) reads the ontologist move critically from within the Thomist revival, tracing how the demand for an immediate intuition of being fed currents the revival sought to close off. The modern verdict is largely a historian’s one: ontologism survives less as a working position than as the nineteenth century’s most determined effort to make the seeing of all things in God the first principle of a philosophy.

The standing of the question

Ontologism is best read less as one tight system than as a family of attempts to keep the Augustinian and Malebranchean inheritance alive inside the theology and the bare epistemology of the nineteenth century — to secure an immediate ground for metaphysical certainty against the rising tide of the Scholastic revival on one side and post-Kantian doubt on the other. Its nearest contrary in the same century is instructive. Where the ontologist holds that being is the mind’s first and surest object, immediately present, Kant’s noumenon — the thing-in-itself of Immanuel Kant — is precisely what the mind cannot reach: the object as it is apart from the forms of sensibility, walled off behind the phenomenon and knowable only by an intuition humans do not possess. The two nineteenth-century doctrines mark the poles of a single question about the mind’s reach. The deeper question ontologism raised, in the metaphysics of knowledge, did not vanish with the condemnation, and it has analogues far outside the Latin Church: the Persian Illuminationist tradition of Suhrawardi made knowledge a matter of presence and light rather than a chain of proofs, by a quite independent route. Whether the mind’s grasp of being is the trace of something prior to all argument, or whether every road to God must run through the world of the senses, is a division older than the word that named one side of it.

Painted portrait of Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (c. 1790), whose thing-in-itself, or noumenon, is precisely what the mind cannot reach — the contrary pole to the ontologist claim that being is the mind’s first object — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)