The Catholic Intellectual Tradition
In his taxonomy of American Catholic higher education Richard Janet distinguishes three types of institutions or rather three ways in which institutions can be Catholic. He labels these canonical, creedal, and cultural, each reflecting an aspect of the church as an institution defined by laws, as a community holding common beliefs, and as a community that embodies common ideas and values. In explaining what it means to be a Catholic college in the cultural sense he says that these colleges interpret their mission "in terms of a more or less serious engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition." (Janet 173) The Catholic bishops of the United States, in addressing the relationship between the universal church and catholic colleges, urge each Catholic college to "develop and maintain a plan for fulfilling its mission that communicates and develops the Catholic intellectual tradition, is of service to the Church and society, and encourages the members of the [college] community to grow in the practice of the faith." (Ex Corde Ecclesiae: An Application to the United States 16) What is this Catholic intellectual tradition that both Professor Janet and the bishops think is a defining characteristic of a Catholic college? Is it something real? Is it something worth preserving and maintaining? Or is "cultural Catholic" merely an polite way of saying "formerly Catholic"?
Before Vatican II there would have been no need to distinguish canonical, creedal and cultural Catholics—they were all the same. The Catholic intellectual tradition would have been synonymous with the scholastic philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, which had such a prominent place in Catholic colleges and seminaries. Today many of the creedal colleges in Janet’s classification see their mission as recovering and preserving this vision of the tradition when Catholic ntellectuals had their feet planted firmly in the ground of the thirteenth century. The problem with this view of the tradition is that it looks at tradition as something that is complete and merely needs to be handed on as a precious heirloom from generation to generation. This view of the tradition is associated with a view of education as merely the passing on of information from faculty to students.
The Catholic intellectual tradition is broader than the Thomism of the scholastic manuals, but St. Thomas can still be regarded as a model of the catholic intellectual. The Catholic intellectual tradition is not identified with any particular doctrines or conclusions. It is an ideal, an ideal that has been embodied and realized more or less perfectly in different periods of the Church’s history over the past two millennia. There are two complementary ways in which we can try to identify what this Catholic Intellectual tradition is. One can distinguish knowledge in two ways—by the object known and by the manner of knowing. One way of identifying the Catholic Intellectual Tradition is to look at the history of this tradition and the thinkers who are associated with it. These individuals and their thought are the concrete embodiment of this tradition. A second way is to identify some common themes that run through this tradition and that form the unifying bond that make these individual thinkers part of a common enterprise.
We can begin with a brief history of the tradition. I will look at this history in four episodes: its origins in the early centuries of the Christian era, the development of the tradition in medieval scholasticism, the crisis that confronted the tradition in as a consequence of the Reformation and the rise of modern natural science, and the more recent developments in the tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The tradition had its roots in the first centuries of the Christian era, as those who were newly converted to faith in Jesus struggled with their relationship to the classical culture that had nurtured them. Did becoming a Christian mean that one had to reject the intellectual culture of Greece and Rome? Did choosing Christ mean that one had to forsake Plato or the Stoics? Some new Christians such as Tertullian maintained that Christian belief was not compatible with rational inquiry and that the Christian had to abandon not only Zeus, Athena and Apollo but also Plato, Aristotle and Zeno. Others, such as Origen and Clement of Alexandra, argued that there was much of value in the old intellectual culture and that the truth of Christianity could be expressed in the language and concepts of Greek philosophy. Perhaps more than any other thinker in the first millennium of Christianity, Saint Augustine of Hippo successfully blended classical thought and Christian faith into a coherent vision of reality that became the model for the catholic intellectual tradition.
This tradition sustained education after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, and in the high middle ages it was embodied in the universities that marked a renewal of intellectual and cultural life. The synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian faith achieved by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century certainly marks one of the high points in this tradition. The world view embodied in scholasticism was actually much broader than the Catholic tradition understood as a view of Roman Catholics. This view was shared by Muslim thinkers such as Ibn Sinna and Ibn Rushd and by Jewish philosophers such as Moses Maimonides. Even among Christian thinkers it was never a monolithic philosophy. There were significant differences between the views of Aquinas and his contemporary Bonaventure, both of whom were faculty members at the University of Paris. But all of these thinkers shared a broad vision of reality as created by God who is the ultimate source of Being, Truth and Goodness. There is only one God, so there is ultimately an objective truth and an objective good. Human reason, within certain limits, is directed towards this truth and goodness and is capable of understanding it.
The unity of this vision was challenged by both the Reformation and by the rise of modern natural science. While some Protestant Reformers accepted the scholastic world view, many rejected it, turning away from its synthesis of faith and reason to a reliance on faith alone. At the same time the new natural science challenged the Aristotelian and Platonic conception of reason and reality that was at the heart of the scholastic synthesis. Thinkers like Galileo and Descartes attempted to reconcile the new science with the tradition, but these efforts were largely rejected by the institutional church which increasingly defined itself in reaction to both Protestant thought and modern science. In this period Catholic thought was largely reactionary.
The situation began to change in the nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth. There was an increased recognition that the need to synthesize faith and reason did not end in the Middle Ages. Just as the early Christians had to struggle with the question whether it was possible to be both a Christian believer and an intellectual in the Greek philosophical tradition, so people of the modern era have struggled with the question whether it is possible to be both a Christian believer and a modern intellectual. How is Christianity compatible with modern natural science or with modern political and economic ideologies? What are we Christians to make of the pluralism and multiculturalism that characterizes so much of contemporary experience? Are the intellectual tools and categories of Greek philosophy adequate for making sense of the modern world? While these questions initially spurred the neo-Thomistic revival represented by Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris and by such thinkers of the twentieth century as Jacques Maritain, they also led to a broader understanding of the tradition represented by a catholic philosopher like Gabriel Marcel, the Second Vatican Council, and John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio.
To understand the Catholic Intellectual tradition in its contemporary setting it is necessary to look at the second approach to defining the tradition. Thus far we have focused on the content of the tradition understood as a history of thought. We can now turn from content to form and look at some common themes that run through this history. Other recent writers, most notably Margaret Steinfels and Monica Hellwig, have addressed this issue. My thoughts on this issue are indebted to them. I believe that the Catholic Intellectual tradition can be characterized through four interrelated ideals that are embodied in the history of Catholic thought:
- A commitment to both faith and reason as complementary;
- A recognition of both the unity of Truth and the multiplicity of the modes for understanding that Truth;
- A respect for the historical dimension of thought;
- An awareness of the value-laden character of nature.
A constant theme in the Catholic intellectual tradition is that faith and reason are both necessary. Pope John Paul II takes up this theme in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio [Faith and Reason]. There he reminds us that faith without reason can too easily become mere emotional sentiment, while reason without faith can too easily mistake a subjective perspective on reality for the reality itself. Catholic colleges serve a unique function of providing an institutional framework for a dialogue between faith and reason. In a college that is really Catholic this dialogue needs to take place not just in philosophy and theology classes, but needs to occur throughout the institution. The ecumenical character of the dialogue also needs to be emphasized. The conversation of faith and reason is not Catholic in the narrow confessional sense, but includes all who believe and seek to integrate that belief within a coherent and rationally defensible worldview.
A second theme in the Catholic intellectual tradition is an emphasis on both the unity of Truth and the plurality of modes for understanding truth. If there is one God, then there is one objective reality that is the ultimate measure of any claim to truth. Nietzsche’s proclamation that there is no truth, only points of view, is rooted in his denial that God exists. But the unity of truth is an ideal to be aimed at, not a present achievement. The human capacity for knowledge proceeds through many modes of thought. Natural science is one of the ways in which we seek to know the ultimate truth about the universe we live in, but it is not the only legitimate way to attain such knowledge. History, philosophy and our aesthetic sensibility are also legitimate ways of knowing. The Catholic intellectual tradition seeks a dialog not only of faith with reason, but also of the modes of reason with one another.
This is related to a third theme in the Catholic intellectual tradition—recognition of the historical dimension to thought. Just as there is a unity of truth but plural modes of understanding this truth, our understanding of the unity of truth is something that develops over time. The truth is not something that we can grasp fully all at once. The aim of an institution of higher education is not merely to transmit a completed truth intact to the next generation; it is to uncover a new dimension to the truth that was not previously recognized. This is not to say that the new understanding of the truth is a new truth. There is an organic unity between past and present. Our understanding of the truth is possible only because we have learned from the efforts of those who have gone before us.
The final theme in the Catholic intellectual tradition is one of the most important for contemporary education. The world of facts is a world of values. In a purely secular worldview the natural world just is what it is. It has no particular value apart from what we subjectively impose on it. In the Christian worldview nature is not something devoid of moral purposes, since it is the creation of a God who is the ultimate source of both being and goodness. No matter what subject matter we investigate in our various disciplines, there is an ethical and value-laden character to that topic.
Robert L. Schimoler, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
The University of Saint Mary
Leavenworth, KS
February 2009
Works Cited
Cahoy, William. "The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: What is It? Why Should I Care?" College of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, MN, 2003. Downloaded 2/12/2009.
Colish, Marcia L. Catholic and Intellectual: Conjunction or Disjunction? Dayton: University of Dayton, 2000.
Hellwig, Monica. "The Catholic aintellectual Tradition in the Catholic University." In A, Cernera and O. Morgan, eds. Examining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University Press, 2000. 1-18.
Janet, Richard J. "Ex Corde Fidei: Toward a Taxonomy of American Catholic Higher Education." Current Issues in Catholic Higher Educaiton 25:2, 2006, 169-175.
John Paul II. Fides et Ratio. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998.
Launderville,Dale, OSB. "Love and Knowledge: The Heart of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition." College of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, MN, 2002. Downloaded 2/12/2009.
Steinfels, Margaret. "The Catholic Intellectual Tradition." Origins 25:11, 1995, 170-173.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Ex Corde Ecclesiae: An Application to the United States. 2000
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