Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Meditations on First Philosophy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Knowledge, Doubt, and Science
God and the World
Mind and Body
Intellectual Discipline
Summary
Analysis
Descartes dedicates the Meditations to the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne, France’s leading university. But he also asks the Faculty to endorse his work. He argues that, while faith and scripture are enough to make Christians like him accept the existence of God and the immortal soul, atheists will only believe in them if they have philosophical proof. After carefully searching for the best possible version of this proof, Descartes is publishing his findings in this book. He warns that some readers might not understand his complex arguments, while others will attack him because they care more about getting attention than discovering the truth. But if the Faculty agrees to publicly support Descartes’s work, it will send a powerful message. Descartes believes that, with the Faculty’s backing, his work could convince all of humanity to accept Christianity’s basic truths.
Readers may be surprised to learn that Descartes begins Meditations by asking for approval from theologians who were basically representatives of the Catholic Church. After all, he is famous for his belief that rationality is humankind’s best tool for understanding the world, an argument that helped spur the Enlightenment and significantly curb the church’s power in Europe. Yet he actually viewed rationality as a way to prove God’s existence with certainty and ultimately reinforce religious faith. As he points out in this letter, atheists refuse to believe in God on faith, so rational arguments for God’s existence are the only way to win them over. Moreover, it was incredibly dangerous to challenge the church’s official beliefs in the 17th century—but this is exactly what Descartes’s work did. Even though he lived in the Netherlands, where the church’s power was very limited, he was seriously worried about ending up like Galileo (who was imprisoned for daring to argue that the Earth revolved around the Sun). But the Sorbonne’s approval would have protected Descartes from such a fate. Unfortunately, he never got it.
Themes
