Descartes, a devout Catholic all his life, had experienced his “method” as a Godgiven revelation and in gratitude—extraordinary as this may seem— vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto. Yet Descartes’ philosophy was profoundly irreligious: his God, a clear idea in his mind, was well on the way to becoming an idol, and his meditation on the thinking self did not result in kenosis but in the triumphant assertion of the ego. There was no awe in Descartes’ theology: indeed, he believed that it was the task of science to dispel wonder. In the future people should look, for
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