Ratio et Fides - Robert E. Wood

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attempts to engage the modern mind. He finds in the work of Husserl and the phenomenological movement that he launched elements that enable the Catholic mind fruitfully to engage the contemporary intellectual. He is attracted to Bernard Lonergan and to Hans Urs von Balthasar because he finds them so engaged. It is to Wood’s credit that, like Gilson, he sees a unity to philosophical experience, but he never forgets that the Greeks and their medieval commentators over the centuries remain a constant source for modernity.

      Jude P. Dougherty

      Dean Emeritus, School of Philosophy

      The Catholic University of America

      AN INTRODUCTION

      This is the Introduction to the book. The book itself is an intro-duction to philosophy for theology—i.e., it is not preliminary but structured to bring the reader into [Latin intro-ducere] the heart of the matter.

      1.

      Though this book had its origin in and for a Catholic context, I have approached it in a nonsectarian manner such that anyone can gain an introduction to philosophy from it, for or not for theology. Indeed, it begins with Pope John Paul II’s letter Fides et Ratio, which is not sectarian but is addressed to all people. The message is: In the face of widespread skepticism and relativism, Believe in Reason! His most memorable idea is that the human spirit soars on two wings, faith and reason. Either one without the other never gets off the ground but flutters around itself.

      The current text was a response on the side of Reason. It was developed in a one-year long, two-credit course for the Deacon Candidates’ Program in the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, and also for the Diocese of Dallas. My intent was to construct a background text for reading classic sources with a view toward the students’ being able to read papal encyclicals, the documents of Vatican II, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and the most formative theologians of the twentieth century: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, and, as a kind of devil’s advocate, Hans Küng. Though the people in the pews do not need to know theology beyond some preliminary level, those who lead the people, deacon’s as well as priests, need to be able to read the tradition of theology with profit, for they will be the preachers and guides to those in the pews. To that end, it is not enough to be able to repeat what the Church teaches, but, more important, to know why it teaches what it does.

      Von Balthasar took the history of biblical understanding and Western philosophy, literature, and theology together as the field out of which he addressed current theological issues. Central to his work is a theological aesthetics and crucial for this work is Hegel’s aesthetics which he finds summarizing the whole tradition. Crucial also is Heidegger, whose project, von Balthasar claims, we (Catholic thinkers) must make our own. For Rahner, both Hegel and Heidegger are crucial to an understanding of Aquinas, and through that, to reawakening issues in contemporary theology. Lonergan’s thought is grounded in a kind of phenomenology of the field of experience and a careful reading of Aquinas, though he has also learned from Hegel and Kant in significant ways. The readings we select have these thinkers especially in view.

      2.

      I call this text an “intro-duction,” a “leading into,” with the hyphen indicating that it leads one into the heart of philosophy. I call it such because, unlike many introductory texts, it is not watered-down philosophy, often presented as a history of opinions. It is not about philosophy, but is an example of philosophy, and philosophy in a specific mode. The approach is through certain select highlights in the history of philosophy presented in the words of the thinkers themselves. But the approach is taken through the phenomenological method. That method describes various types of evidences and the modes of awareness having the evidence. It shows how to see for oneself is the only adequate basis for seeing the cogency of what the philosophers claim.

      Because we are studying philosophy as preliminary to the study of theology for deacon candidates, the first text we chose is Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio, on faith and reason. Here the pope exhorts contemporary culture to trust in the power of reason—in effect, to cultivate fides in ratio or ratio in fides and not fall into scepticism and relativism or biblicism and fideism. He exhorts thinkers not to abandon the attempt to develop a comprehensive view of things. And he lays stress again and again upon the autonomy of reason. The understanding of the faith depends upon the developed capacity of reason and gives to reason the further task of developing our understanding of revelation in theology. He points to the continual use of the independently developed philosophies of Plato and Aristotle by the Church Fathers and medieval Scholastic theologians. In general, he makes the case for mandating the study of philosophy for those preparing for ministry.

      John Paul II developed his own thought through a study of phenomenology. Our second text is thus a short work in phenomenology entitled “Phenomenology of the Mailbox: Much Ado about Nothing.” It shows the various types of evidences involved in our everyday activities: the various features of differing modes of sensation, the different levels of awareness involved in attending to these modes, the functioning of systems of production and exchange involved in the postal system, speech and writing, the nature of language, as well as personal presence and absence, matters presupposed in all our dealings, everyday and scientific. The piece especially aims at recovering a reflective sense of the differentness of awareness from any externally given evidence. It is reflection upon awareness which drives the wedge into contemporary attempts to reduce the human being to externally combined bits of matter and human awareness to brain functions.

      3.

      Armed with the battery of evidences attended to phenomenologically, we then set about our reading of the tradition. Since the course meets only once a month, candidates are invited to read the whole of each text, although they will be expected to focus only upon particular parts of each. We begin with parts of Plato’s Republic, the most basic text in Western philosophy. The themes we focus upon are the moral virtues, the structure of the soul, the levels of knowing involved in the pursuit of the Good as Principle of the Whole, death, immortality and the judgment of the dead.

      A chapter on Aristotle shows how he developed in relation to Plato, his teacher, and prepared the way for the incarnational view of Christian existence developed by Thomas Aquinas and brought forward in our own day by John Paul II in Theology of the Body. We focus upon the nature of the soul and its various functions, upon the virtues required for self-mastery and human coexistence, upon the fundamentally sociopolitical character of the human being whose rationality develops in and through language, and upon the way to the Unmoved Mover as Self-Thinking Thought.

      We then go on to examine the way in which the two greatest Catholic theologians, Augustine and Aquinas, developed their theologies by employing Greek philosophy. Our next reading is thus from Augustine’s Confessions. Here the philosophic themes we focus upon are his assimilation of Neoplatonism which helped him in thinking of God and the soul in other than material terms, as well as the key notions of the restless heart, time, and memory.

      Readings from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae show how Aquinas shifted the grounds for developing theology from basically Platonic thought to basically Aristotelian thought. The shift involved a view of embodiment as essential to the character of being human. The human being is not a spirit trapped in a body for a period, as Neoplatonists thought, but an essentially incarnate spirit destined by nature and grace for the resurrection. Embodiment is such a good thing that God himself became incarnate and prefigured our own resurrection. In this life God’s grace is mediated through the sacraments as material signs, most especially by the transformed bread and wine in the Eucharist. Aquinas’s approach entailed the principle that grace presupposes and perfects a rational nature.

      René Descartes’s Discourse on Method is a short work that inaugurated distinctively modern philosophy. Like Plato he attempted to back off from the tradition in order to show the fundamental evidences available to reason. He developed a mode of thinking that involved a notion of body exhaustively treatable by scientific method and culminated in what became the view of the Clockwork Universe in modern physics. It entailed a dualism in human existence between a mechanized body and a separate substance mind/soul. Descartes set the conceptual framework for the way modern science has developed and the way body is considered today in natural

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