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Robert Boyle on things above reason

Robert Boyle (1627–91) presents the most authoritative systematization and defence of the traditional distinction between ‘things above reason’ and ‘things contrary to reason’ in early modern philosophy. The distinction differentiates truths that in some sense surpass human understanding from truths that conflict with it. It is typically deployed to define the limits of reason on the one hand (affirming the existence of a sphere of truths ‘above reason’), while upholding its authority on the other (denying the existence of truths ‘contrary to reason’). The point is to allow that there are true propositions that surpass human comprehension without thereby conceding the fallibility of reason or the violability of logic. Most often it was the mysteries of revealed religion that set the immediate context for the seventeenthand eighteenth-century controversies over things above and contrary to reason. Here the distinction presented a popular way of explaining how certain revealed doctrines or articles of faith – such as the Trinity and the Incarnation – could be beyond comprehension in some sense, but legitimate objects of belief all the same. However, as Boyle and other philosophers noted, the division can also be employed in natural religion, general metaphysics, mathematics, ethics and natural philosophy. Even those divines whose polemical agenda began and ended with the revealed mysteries typically defended the distinction by appealing to its applications outside the bounds of religion. At its most general level, then, the division promises a comprehensive way of articulating the limits of reason in all spheres of belief and assent. In Boyle’s treatment, it also presents a way of explaining our ability to think both sides of these borders, and our ability, in certain situations, to assent responsibly to propositions beyond the natural bounds of reason. Various early modern philosophers affirm the distinction between things above and contrary to reason, including Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz and British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15(2) 2007: 283 – 312