Here is the excerpt from John Paul’s book:
All of the rationalism of the last centuries–as much in its Anglo-Saxon expression as in its COntinental expression in Kantianism, Hegelianism, and the German philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to Husserl and Heidegger–can be considered a continuation and an expansion of Cartesian positions. The author of Meditationes de Prima Philosophia with his ontological proofs, distanced us from the philosophy of existence, and also from the traditional approaches of Saint Thomas which lead to God who is “autonomous existence,” Ipsum esse subsistens. By making subjective consciousness absolute, Descartes moves instead toward pure consciousness of the Absolute, which is pure thought. Such an Absolute is not autonomous existence but rather autonomous thought. Only that which corresponds to human thought makes sense. The objective truth of this thought is not as important as the fact that something exists in human consciousness.
We find ourselves on the threshold of modern immanentism and subjectivism. Descartes marks the beginning of the development of the exact and natural sciences as well as of the humanistic sciences in their new expression. He turns his back on the metaphysics and concetrates on the philosophy of knowledge. Kant is the most norable representative of this movement.
Though the father of modern rationalism certainly cannot be blamed for the move away from Christianity, it is difficult not to acknowledge that he created the climate in which, in the modern era, such an estrangement became possible. It did not happen right away, but gradually.
Earlier, he addresses Descartes even more pointedly:
…Descartes, who split thought from existence and identified existence with reaon itself: "Cogito, ego sum" (“I think, therefore I am”).
How different from the approach of Saint Thomas, for whom it is not thought which determines existence, but existence, esse," which determintes thought! I think the way I think because I am that which I am–a creature–and because He is He who is, the absolute uncreated Mystery. If He were not Mystery, there would be no need for Revelation, or, more precisely, there would be no need for God to reveal Himself.
That’s JP II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1994: 38, 51-52.
Descartes’ philosophical point is the result of a cultural atmosphere, brought on by the Reformation, in which God seemed distant and ungraspable, and the Truth utterly forsaken. Hence then, as today, a deep chasm began to grow between those Rationalists who, like Prometheus, wanted to steal the knowledge of God for themselves through reason, and the fideists, those anti-intellectuals who despaired of the knowledge of God and settled instead for a mindless and emotional religiosity.
Descartes is not the first, nor necessarily the most important figure in that movement. William of Ockham and Francis Bacon, for example, were already feverish with the passion for rationalism; and Luther himself was the poster-boy and anti-intellectualism.
These are not actually opposites, although they appear that way; both are simply two sides of the same denarius of despair.
Thanks (from a university student who is Catholic) and God Bless.
