Catholics, Evangelicals and Philosophy

One of the most attractive things about the Roman Catholic Church is its openness to reason and its long-standing resistance to anti-intellectualism, obscurantism, relativism and shallow thinking. The Enlightenment movement tried to portray itself as the voice of reason over against the superstition and ignorance of Christianity, but the Church was battling sophists and irrational mystics long before anybody ever thought of the Enlightenment and now continues to champion reason as Enlightenment-inspired scientism spirals down into nihilistic solipsism.

Here is an encouraging little note from Rome about adjustments to the curriculum for priestly formation. Evangelical colleges, seminaries and universities should take note.

"With the human ability to think under fire from relativism, priests and theologians need to study more philosophy, the Vatican says.This was one of the main points of the "Decree on the Reform of Ecclesiastical Studies of Philosophy," which Benedict XVI approved Jan. 28 (the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas), and Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, prefect of the Congregation for Catholic Education, presented Tuesday.

The cardinal explained that the Church is always adapting to respond to the needs of changing historical-cultural circumstances, and that many ecclesial institutions today are lacking in philosophical formation.

This absence is particularly noteworthy at a time "in which reason itself is menaced by utilitarianism, skepticism, relativism and distrust of reason's ability to know the truth regarding the fundamental problems of life," he reflected.

New guidelines are in accordance with Pope John Paul II's "Fides et Ratio," the cardinal added, which notes that "theology has always had and continues to have need of a philosophical contribution."

Cardinal Grocholewski said the Church intends to recover metaphysics, namely a philosophy that will again pose the most profound questions of the human being.

The Vatican official stressed that technology and science cannot "satiate man's thirst in regard to the ultimate questions: What does happiness consist of? Who am I? Is the world the fruit of chance? What is my destiny? etc. Today, more than ever, the sciences are in need of wisdom."

He said that the "original vocation" of philosophy needs to be recovered: "the search for truth and its sapiential and metaphysical dimension."

The cardinal also emphasized the importance of logic, calling it a discipline that structures reason and that has disappeared because of the present crisis of Christian culture.

The rector of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum), Dominican Father Charles Morerod, added that there is no contradiction between philosophy and faith.

"Christianity presupposes a harmony between God and human reason," he said.

"The importance of philosophy is linked directly with the human desire to know the truth and to organize it," the rector explained. "Experience shows that knowledge of philosophy helps us to better organize, in cooperation with other disciplines, the study of any science."

"Metaphysics seeks to know the whole of reality -- culminating in knowledge of the First Cause of everything -- and to show the mutual relationship between the different fields of learning, avoiding any closing in on themselves of the individual sciences," he added.

Ecclesiastical philosophy degrees will thus increase to 180 credits, going from two-year programs to three-year. There will also be more stringent requirements for professors, with greater demands for doctors in philosophy, preferably with degrees earned from an ecclesiastical institution. Theology degree programs will not be longer, but will have more philosophy credits during the first years."

A couple of statements in particular stood out to me as important. First, "With the human ability to think under fire from relativism, priests and theologians need to study more philosophy." This statement, it seems to me, goes deep down toward the heart of our cultural crisis. The problems with relativism go far beyond ethics to matters of epistemology, logic and truth.

A second statement, from Cardinal Grocholewski, that stood out was: "the 'original vocation' of philosophy needs to be recovered: 'the search for truth and its sapiential and metaphysical dimension.'" Our culture is in dire need of philosophy, but most of the philosophy done in universities has made itself irrelevant and uninteresting because it has abandoned its "big picture" search for truth about reality and how the different aspects of will, passions, and intellect relate to each other. Theology could pursue this task but it is almost entirely marginalized. Philosophy is desperately needed, but is apparently not up to the task. This leads me to think that the most important philosophy in the decades ahead will be done outside the secularized universities of the West.

Evangelicals need to recover philosophy if they are to bear a witness to Christianity as a worldview with culture-renewing power and inspirational vision. The Roman Catholic Church is resisting the spirit of age. Why can't we?

The Theology of the Body #2: The Rejection of Modern Dualism

One of the main themes running through John Paul II's TOB (Theology of the Body) is the rejection of modern gnostic tendencies that are enshrined in modern philosophy, twisted in Romanticism, implemented in technology and finally worshiped in liberal theology. It is, after all, a theology of the body. But why does John Paul II put it this way? Why call it a theology of the body? I think there are many reasons one could point to in answer to this question, but let me just suggest two in the space of this blog post.

The Biblical Doctrine of Creation as the Foundation of Biblical Theology
First, John Paul II's project is a theological anthropology grounded in the doctrine of creation. God created man as a body-soul complex and the body is neither incidental to our true nature nor dispensable. We are our bodies. So John Paul II can speak of the "language of the body" as if the body was a person - because it is. I am my body and I speak through my body; this is what is behind the common phrase "body language." How if fidget, whether I make eye contact, what I do with my hands - all these things are part of the way "I" communicate. The person who is Craig Carter is a body and this fact is the reason why physical death is so unnatural and so fearsome; we rightly fear death because we fear the disintegration of the person as the body dies. We do not take lightly the loss of our bodies for the very good reason that we are our bodies and we are therefore talking about the loss of self.

For John Paul II, the Bible is a unified revelation that speaks to the way we are, what is wrong with us and how we can become what we were created to become. He finds a teleological understanding of human being not only in reason, but in Divine revelation. The Bible begins with the marriage of Adam and Eve and ends with the marriage supper of the Lamb. The heart of the Bible is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ.

In the OT the relationship between Yahweh and Israel is compared to that between a bride and her husband and in the NT the relationship between Christ and the Church is compared to that of a bridegroom and bride. Near the physical center of Scripture is the Song of Songs, about which John Paul II thinks everybody is right. He thinks that the Fathers and the mystics who treated it as an allegory of the relationship of the soul to God were right on one level. But he also has sympathy for modern Evangelical literalists who interpret it as Middle Eastern love poetry and argue that God must not be embarrassed by sexual joy. John Paul II thinks it is about that too. And those who, like Barth, see it as linking the old and new covenants by foreshadowing the relationship between Christ and the Church in the context of the prophetic teaching on marriage as the relationship between the LORD and Israel are also right. Bodies do just fine, John Paul II thinks, as analogies for the Divine human relationship.

The point is that the Bible has an awful lot to say about bodies. Those who think it is a "spiritual" book are not wrong but bodies have spiritual significance and any sort of body-spirit dualism that says that one has little or nothing to do with the other does not understand biblical spirituality. For John Paul II, our bodies are at the center of God's creative activity, they are fallen as a result of sin, yet the image of God is not destroyed by sin and God is at work to redeem our bodies, a process which one day will culminate in the resurrection of the body into a glorious new divinized, spiritualized, glorified order of existence. The Bible, one might say with little exaggeration, for John Paul II, is all about bodies.

The Biblical Doctrine of Creation as the Basis for the Rejection of Modern Philosophical Anthropology
The second reason it is called a theology of the body is that John Paul II is here attempting to provide an alternative to the modern philosophical anthropology that has become dominant since Descartes.

For early modern philosophers like Bacon and Descartes the quest for power over nature was extremely important and a new concept of subjectivity was developed in which a dualism was created between the self, the consciousness, which was exalted to a divine status, and, on the other hand, the body, which was regarded as part of a mechanistic nature subject to the mechanical laws of nature described by Newton. So humans are, in this dualistic understanding, immaterial centers of consciousness, which are free, and bodies, which are subject to impersonal laws of physics. Here is an extended quote from philosopher Kenneth Schmitz, describing the situation that John Paul II faced:

"The mechanistic account of human nature in the wake of Bacon and Descartes denied the interiority of material beings & consequently the kinship of the human person with the subrational natural cosmos. Alone in an inhospitable world that had been deprived of inner meaning, the freedom of the conscious subject becomes ‘absolute,’ detached from sources of meaning: ‘This, then, is the genesis of the modern sense of self as subjectivity. We might say that subjectivity is the self-defense by which consciousness fends off a world either hostile to its inhabitation or at least without companionate room for it, even while consciousness subverts the integrity of that world by its imperious demands. The modern shift gave to the human subject an absolute status precisely in its character quaconsciousness; for human consciousness not only sets its own terms but the terms for reality itself.” (Kenneth Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama, pp. 135-6)

So, in modernity, the non-material center of consciousness is sovereign, rational and free but the body is not.

John Paul II's TOB is an attempt to put the human creature back together on the basis of the biblical doctrine of creation. Man is a body-soul complex, not a dualistic mind somehow connected to a physical body (the mind-body problem of modern philosophy). John Paul II is a Thomist so he does not accept modern philosophy, but in TOB he is not concerned to replace modern philosophical anthropology with a Thomist anthropology; rather, he is concerned to appeal to the doctrine of creation as discovered through biblical exegesis. John Paul II has this weird idea that Thomism is actually biblical and that God has created the world and revealed truth about the world that actually cohere! (See Veritatis Splendor, Par. 44-45 and the work of Matthew Levering, especially his recent Biblical Natural Law (Oxford, 2008).

So for John Paul II, unlike modern dualism, the body is as much an aspect of the person as the mind is. We are as much bodies as we are minds. Of course, the account of sin given in Scripture reveals that we experience a lack of cohesion as persons under the conditions of the fall, and modern dualism is a reflection of that sinful disintegration (which is one reason sin and death are so closely related in Pauline theology, for example). But we were created as unified, coherent beings and our redemptive destiny is reintegration. So Christian theology cannot follow modern philosophy into a dualism in which the body becomes basically as tool of the self, a means by which the self acts in the world but not really the true self. Christian theology, in order to be biblical and reform modern distortions, must therefore be a theology of the body.

For moderns, it is easy to see how the body becomes a despised tool of the self; modern use their bodies to achieve their goals but the body is just ultimately a part of nature. For John Paul II, on the other hand, the body has all the dignity of the person. We should respect our bodies and express ourselves through our bodies rather than using our bodies. The modern tendency for people to "use" each other's bodies for fleeting pleasure is thus preceded by the habit of using their own bodies in that manner. In the TOB bodies are too important to use as tools, manipulate with technology and treat impersonally as means rather than as ends.

How all this relates to personhood will be the subject of a following post.

Modern Philosophy as Sophistry

The Geography of Good and Evil: Philosophical Investigations, byAndreas Kinneging (ISI Books, 2009) is a terrific book. It is excellent prose: clear, precise and penetrating. And it is bold and unshackled by the stifling conventions of contemporary political correctness. It challenges modernity as a degeneration from the classical and Christian tradition. I previously posted on his chapter two, which deals the the "solid night" of the Enlightenment. It was called: "Kinneging on the Difference Between Liberalism and Conservatism.

In this post, I just want to note an interesting point Kinneging makes in chapter 5, where he discusses the basis for moral values in modernity. Kinneging distinguishes between moral values, aesthetic values and vital values and notes that the dominant view today is that the vital values are the highest and that the moral values drive from them. The most fundamental value, according to the dominant view today, is life itself and moral values are valuable because they serve vital values.

We see this is in evolutionary theory which posits the moral values as arising because of their utility in the struggle for survival, as for example, in a liberal like F. A. Hayek (cf. The Fatal Conceit, ch. 1). But as Kinneging says (p. 72), the classic formulation of this view is in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathian.

There Hobbes describes his chaotic state of nature, which is a war against all. Hobbes speaks of "natural laws" that man must obey in order to ensure his own survival. But these "natural laws" are not laws in the Aristotelian/Thomist sense of inhering in the nature of things quite apart from whether they are recognized may man, useful to man or even known by man. In modernity, they are simply techniques for survival. Kinneging writes:

"He must, for instance, honor contracts - be true to his word - because his
failure to do so would ultimately imperil peace in society. The result would be
man's descent into a state of war where his life is no longer secure. Man should
also show gratitude, because in gratitude eventually leads to a state of war,
where his own survival is also at stake. For the same reason - self-preservation
- every man should accommodate himself to society, show mercy, and not treat
anyone with contempt, among other things." (72)

Of course, any first year philosophy student can spot the gaping hole in this argument. It is that if the opportunity to act immorally comes up in such a way that one could get away with it and be reasonably sure of not getting caught, then there is no reason to act morally. Moreover, if one thinks one is strong enough to win the war against one's enemies, then there is no reason not to rob them blind and repel them by force if necessary. Hobbes assumes that people will be moral even when they do not perceive it to be in their best interests just because it is necessary that most people act this way most of the time in order for peace and security to exist in society, but Machiavelli most certainly does not.

Kinneging points out that Hobbes’ argument is not original with him; it is advanced by Glaucon at the beginning of Book II of Plato's The Republic. Glaucon argues that man would prefer to commit injustice if he could be assured of getting away with it, but Socrates argues that justice is to be preferred both in itself and for the good results that flow from it. For Glaucon, Hobbes, Machiaelli, Nietzsche, Hayek and much of modernity, man acts morally "purely and simply because to do otherwise would imperil his own like." Moral values derive from vital values; all morality is really self-preservation. Machiavelli and Nietzsche believe that certain men are exempt from the rules that govern most of us and that they should take advantage of the fact that society is based on moral rules to gain and exercise power by considering themselves above and beyond morality.

Kinneging points out that Socrates argued that "the highest value should be assigned not to life but to a just life" and that "it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice." (73) Jesus Christ also teaches this message in the Sermon on the Mount: "He too preaches that we must always do what is morally right, irrespective of what others do to us, even if it costs us our lives." (73) In other words, moral values outrank vital values and must never be compromised even to save our own lives. And both Socrates and Christ died for the sake of justice.

I haven't got time in this short post to summarize how Kinneging defends the Greek-Christian traditon of the absoluteness of morality against ancient and modern sophistry. My point simply is to point out that modern philosophy is based on sophistic arguments and viewpoints, which have already been decisively refuted and transcended by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas. Modernity presents itself as progressive and as better because newer, but in truth it is neither progress or new. It represents a lapsing back into the aspects of pre-Christian paganism that were left behind by the progress of Western civilization.

Ed Feser's book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, makes the same arguement in great detail. Both Kinneging and Feser view the Enlightenment as the fall of darkness on the West and both see the future hope as consisting in a return to the sources and a reinvigoration of the classical and Christian philosophical tradition.

Anyone who has spent time in the ethos of the modern university has felt the oppression of the spirit of sophistry. The focus is not on truth or logic, but on how to be persuasive, how to market consumer goods to people who do not need them and on how to manipulate public opinion in order to gain profit and power. This ethos is centered on the business and law schools, but it makes itself felt throughout the university, even in the arts faculty. In the science faculty, the emphasis is on "useful" knowledge; that is, knowledge that enables us to manipulate nature in such a way as to enable humans to satisfy their desires more easily.

Like the sophists of ancient Athens, modern universities pride themselves in teaching young people what they need to become rich and successful, powerful and famous. They pride themselves in being shallow, in being unconcerned for truth and in prostituting themselves to "customers" for cash.

The point is that to call modern philosophy "sophistical" is a grave insult and it is to reject it to the extent that the label applies. Kinneging gets the last word; he ends chapter 5 as follows:

"This analysis allows us to make a brief comment about the current
debate surrounding 'values.' One of the roots of this debate is the
feeling that moral values are no longer taken seriously (enough). . . The
sense that there is something wrong with this can, I think, be explained by teh
face that we, like Socrates, Christ and Kant, sense that this 'transvaluation of
all values' is in disharmony with the nature of things. Unlike Socrates,
Christ and Kant, however, we are unsure of how to put this into words. It
therefore behooves us to return to those sources. That is where we can
find the words to say what we mean." (76)