In the fifth of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes asserts that “Certainty, and the truth of all science, depend solely upon knowledge of the true God.” And indeed, Descartes prides himself on having proved God’s existence not through revelation, but through reason. In my talk, I argue that Descartes’s effort to establish a link between the existence of God and the ability of the human mind to think without using images needs to be understood in the context of the endless polemics swirling around the concept of idolatry in seventeenth-century France. Descartes saw himself as solving, once and for all, a question that had reached a particularly nasty impasse—what is the proper role of images, and even the created world, in attaining knowledge of God? Yet by releasing the mind from the imagination and by defining the will through its godlike independence, Descartes raises the possibility, paradoxically often identified as idolatrous, that humans are capable of creation. The philosopher’s repeated, and often derisive, rejection of this possibility, both in the Meditations and in his responses to his contemporaries’ objections, demonstrates that the specter of idolatry, broadly defined as a reversal of the relationship between Creator and creation, is not so easily dismissed in a century still transitioning to what we now call modernity.

Ellen McClure is Associate Professor of History and French and Francophone Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This lecture is made possible through the support of the College Arts and Humanities Institute, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Provost, the Mary-Margaret Barr Koon Fund of the Department of French and Italian, and the Department of Religious Studies. There will be coffee, tea and light refreshments.

Cost: Free

For more information contact:

Massimo Scalabrini
[email protected]