The Line of Despair

A term from Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There describing the historical rupture in Western thought; a line crossed when philosophy abandoned the hope that rational man could reach objective truth and meaning. Above the line: thinkers like Aquinas and the early scientists who believed in a unified field of knowledge where reason could access both facts and meaning because both were grounded in a rational Creator. Below the line: Hegel, Kierkegaard, and the modern existentialists who accepted that reason cannot deliver meaning, and so sought meaning through irrational or experiential means instead. The “despair” is not emotional; it is structural. Once you sever facts from meaning, you cannot get them back together without an external anchor. Schaeffer argued that only the infinite-personal God of Christianity provides that anchor, because only a God who is both rational (making facts intelligible) and personal (making meaning possible) can hold the two halves of reality together.