Jacques Maritain Center :
Thomism in an Age of Renewal /
by Ralph McInernyThe question of the effects of faith on philosophy can be raised in close continuity with our discussion of the notion of tradition. In the foregoing chapter, having pointed out that whoever learns philosophy is by that very fact involved in a tradition, we went on to speak of a variety of ways of being so involved. We even indulged ourselves to the extent of speaking of opting for a contemporary tradition as opposed to an older one. It is important that we see now how misleading and unreal such talk of opting is.
"Come on in, the water's fine," would be an absurd invitation coming from someone standing fully clothed and with undamp hair at poolside. It would be equally absurd to expect that anyone would have views on tradition's impact on philosophy before having engaged in the study of philosophy. The whole thing has to be retrospective; it has to issue from someone already in the swim of things. Our present question can be put this way, "Did he jump or was he pushed?"
The Catholic who finds that simply in virtue of the fact that he has gone to a given school he has been introduced to a certain kind of philosophy, one perhaps that derives from St. Thomas Aquinas, may feel indignant about not having been consulted beforehand. On a matter of such moment, he may come to feel, he should have been presented with the alternatives and permitted to choose. As it is, he has already put in several semesters, let us say, and he can never regain the philosophical innocence that was his before he took any courses. In his disenchantment -- let us imagine someone who is unhappy with what he has contracted in his philosophy courses -- he may conjure up an ideal situation in which, before one commences the study of philosophy, he passes in review the various ways of beginning and in the end makes a reasonable choice. True, one could come to regret a choice so made, but at least the regret would be for one's own mistake and not that of an institution. Before exploring the possibility of such a choice, let us consider a number of other ways in which one might get involved in philosophy other than the way our disgruntled Catholic did.
To begin with the trivial and capricious, we might imagine someone taking shelter from the rain in a bookstore and finding himself in the section labeled "Philosophy and Phrenology." Bored and mildly curious, he permits his eye to graze along the shelves until his fancy is caught by a handsomely bound volume, its leather glinting in the half-light of the shop. He removes it from the shelf, he admires its heft in his hand, the supple almost sensuous rippling of the cover. Opening it, he lets its spine rest in his palm and pages with growing interest through it. After a moment he begins to read. "It was Descartes," he says afterward. "The Discourse on Method. It changed my life." A committed Cartesian, in other words, and that is just what we want. Now, if we should ask him why he began the study of philosophy with Descartes -- a serious fellow, his library now consists largely of the philosophers -- he may be tempted to say that Descartes is the natural starting point. Or, given Descartes' reputation, what better place? But he is honest and would doubtless admit that he began with Descartes because he knew enough to come in out of the rain, because the copy of Descartes appealed to his bibliophilic and aesthetic sense. he just happened to start with Descartes. It could as easily have been Denis the Areopagite, Swedenborg, Schelling, or Lucretius. He might want to say that if he had indeed picked up one of those it is unlikely he would ever have become interested in philosophy. But that would prove only that attraction to and flight from philosophy could equally be due to chance.
Another imaginary situation. Sidney enrolls at Neurotic State, signs up for a course in animal husbandry, and thank to an errant IBM card, finds himself in Philosophy I. Five minutes into the first class meeting he suspects the horrible truth and, turning to Krishna, the pneumatic blonde beside him, starts to ask if this is animal husbandry. Smitten by her beauty, Sidney's mouth moves but words do not emerge. No matter. he would stay now if the class were advanced metaphysics. The weeks pass, Sidney's ardor for Krishna cools, his defense drops and he finds himself following the lecture. He is fascinated. Et cetera. Years later, Sidney, now Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tic Tech, finds himself a member of a self-study committee financed by the Sand Foundation. In the course of an extempore homily on the need for more rational sequence in the philosophy offerings, he is beset by memories of IBM cards, of animal husbandry, of Krishna. He falls silent. What troubles him? The lacrimae rerum, a consuming sense of temps perdu? Perhaps. But there is an outside chance he is thinking of the utter irrationality of the circumstances that attended his own induction into the ranks of the philosophers. Like the man who came in out of the rain, Sidney can blame (or praise) no institutional program for his beginning; Sidney can only point to what Nathanael West called the Chauffeur within.
If we move on to more reasonable beginnings, we could consider a young man whose Uncle George, whom he respects highly, urges him to read the Critique of Pure Reason. "No boy should be without a copy," Uncle George says at first and, later, "Without a thorough grounding in the Critique no one can be considered an educated man." Now this is pretty heady talk for the nephew and we are not surprised to see him sprinting off to the library. If we should ask him after the lapse of years why he began with Kant, he would say that he took Uncle George's advice. He trusted Uncle George. Now for Uncle George we can substitute, in the experience of most of us, a college adviser, a curriculum committee that made Philosophy I a required course, good old St. Philomena's College, or an article in Time. Most of us took somebody's word for the way we became introduced to philosophy and most of us were relatively unconscious that we were doing so. It is only in retrospect, perhaps, that we become aware that out of various modes of entree we were directed to one.
The upshot of the foregoing, then, is this. There are two general ways of beginning the study of philosophy. One is by chance and the other is by following someone's advice. Now the disgruntled young Catholic we spoke of a moment ago may meaningfully contrast what happened to him with what happened to the boy in the bookstore on a rainy day or with what happened to Sidney. But how does his experience differ from that of the nephew who took his uncle's advice or of students in other colleges who were advised to take or had to take philosophy? It would seem that there is no significant difference, at least not of the kind he in his disenchantment imagined.
What he imagined, remember, was some way in which the various philosophies or the various ways to begin the study of philosophy were passed in review so that a choice could be made of one of them. So be it. Let the play be played. In terms of what would one who had not previously studied philosophy choose? For what does it mean to pass the possibilities in review? Surely not to study each philosophy in turn or to try our various modes of introduction, for then inevitably one would be in the water already. One might listen to descriptions of philosophies and of ways to begin, but what is being described is what others have done and what one might do. To put it more specifically, if the choice is being thought of under the general aegis of what is the best way to gain help from others in answering such questions as, Is death the end? What should I do? What can I know? What is knowledge? etc. -- well, then, on that assumption, in order to make a choice, one must take someone's word for the value of this man or that, this method or that. Wouldn't it be strange if a young man, about to start the study of philosophy, should say to his adviser, "You're right!" How could he know the adviser is right before he has followed the advice?
If the foregoing is not without connection with the way things are, the kind of choice envisaged by our disgruntled novice would not transport him into a situation radically different from the one he is now lamenting. He may be angry with the advisers he has had but in the possibility he imagines the beginner would still be dependent on the advice of others or on the reputation of authors -- but reputation is only a kind of anonymous advice.
The general conclusion I want to draw is this. Anyone who begins the study of philosophy, who undertakes to learn it in the sense of learning developed in the previous chapter, is put in the position of having to believe the route he is taking is a good one. He is trusting someone. This is only what we would expect, of course, since learning philosophy is a social affair and trust is the basis of society. Yet this is a truism it is well to recall at the present juncture when dissatisfaction wih the way philosophy has been taught in Catholic colleges leads to implicit or explicit appeal to a way of beginning philosophy which is quite simply impossible of realization. It is not what everyone else does because it is what no one could do. The Catholic, then, is in this respect in a generic situation, not a unique one. This does not mean that criticism of his specific situation is impossible and that we should not consider ways in which students could more effectively be introduced to philosophy. But whatever plan we come up with, be it ever so flawless and exciting, it will remain something the fledgling in philosophy, the boy or girl arcing a mental toe for the first time toward the philosophical waters, will have to take our word for. Whether programs are old or new, good or bad, those who come under them have to trust their framers that they are effective and good.
I reserve for the moment a consideration of no small importance, namely, the advantage of the Catholic in this matter. If the Catholic, like everyone else, has to trust others when he commences the study of philosophy, recalling this may remove the embarrassment some apparently feel at the realization that from the very outset they were told what philosophy to study. It turns out that in some sense everyone is in the same boat. But there are boats and boats, trust and trust, advice and advice. For the Catholic, the ordinary magisterium of the Church will carry slightly more weight than an obiter dictum of Uncle George. What if that which embarrasses some Catholics is not only an instance of a universal situation, but within the universal situation, an infinitely preferable and more efficacious way of being introduced to philosophy?
When one has made the point that at the outset of the study of philosophy, when we begin to learn philosophy, faith or trust in others is required, he must go on to insist that such faith is temporary and not terminal; we trust others because by following their advice we hope to arrive at a point where it will no longer be necessary to trust them in order to know: the believing at issue here is destined to be overcome by knowledge. Quite obviously, what we are now saying is simply another way of speaking of the proper way to benefit from a tradition. And just as one who becomes involved in a tradition has other resources than what is told him, so too the trust which is necessary if we are to learn is not something utterly blind and unquestioning. We may suspend disbelief on certain points but we can do this only because on other points we know. For example, when we are told to accept something rather obscure on the promise that it will later be clarified, we do so if we do because other connected matters are not unclear. There are a number of mental attitudes at play here and something may be gained by looking briefly at each.
We have contrasted in an initial way knowing and believing, but what we have said can be seen to involve such attitudes as supposing, thinking (in the sense of having an opinion), and doubting. If by knowing we mean a judgment whose warrant is a direct acquaintance with certain things, the judgment may be thought of as expressible in a proposition whose truth or falsity is decided by more or less direct reference to the things spoken of. Knowing would differ from opinion in this that the subject matter effectively closes inquiry in the case of knowledge but not in that of opinion. To think that such-and-such is the case, to have an opinion, may be based on acquaintance with a given subject matter when it is precisely the subject matter which prevents us from saying we know in the strong sense. What we hold is more likely than not the case, but it is possible, however remotely, that it is not the case.
Aquinas spoke of the opposition between knowing and opining in the following way.{1} Since the judgments involved are expressible in propositions, knowledge is such that the contradictory of what is known is unconditionally rejected because of the evidence one has. In the case of opinion, a proposition is accepted but with the recognition that its contradictory might be true. Inquiry, which can issue in knowledge or opinion, is thus thought of as addressing two contradictory propositions and asking which is true. To doubt a proposition is to suspect that its contradictory is more likely to be true; to suppose something is to treat a proposition as true; to suppose something is to treat a proposition as true for some purpose. Much more could be said of each of these, of course, but on the basis of the little that has been said it can be seen why one could not have knowledge and opinion of the same matter. This is not to say that an opinion is never spoken of as knowledge or that knowledge is never introduced as one's opinion. Nevertheless, it is possible to assign meanings to these terms, meanings which are not arbitrary and which in many respects accord with common usage, thanks to which knowledge and opinion can be definitively opposed. What now of faith?
The title of this chapter suggests an opposition between philosophy, what can be known and what can be opined, on the one hand, and, on the other, what is believed by religious faith. That is the opposition we are ultimately interested in, of course, but we are trying to approach it by way of a garden variety of faith, human faith, the trust one man can place in another. So soon as we put it this way we are reminded of the familiar tenet to the effect that to believe is at once to believe something and someone.{2} In speaking of the way in which we begin the formal study of philosophy (putting aside the purely adventitious ways of beginning, though this is not to say that chance may not enter into the choice of a school, etc.), we wanted to say that we believe someone about the best way to begin that study. The one we believe may be Uncle George, a counselor, a curriculum committee, or something far vaguer like the tradition of a school, and what we believe is that such and such a course, a certain author or authors, a given period in the history of philosophy, represents a good starting point for our study of philosophy. At the outset we can't know or even in a full sense have an opinion that what we accept is true. If we accept it we do so because someone has said it. Our conclusion is that it is an extremely common thing for people to begin the study of philosophy on the basis of trust in someone's word, that the judgment we make, a judgment exemplified in our following the advice, is made in terms of exta-philosophical criteria. For we do of course make a judgment, but what we appeal to is the credibility of our adviser, our feeling that he has no reason to mislead us, etc.
Once this common situation is recognized, it is possible to discuss the similarity and difference between the Catholic and non-Catholic in this area. The Catholic is given advice by the Church as to how he might best begin the study of philosophy and the Church, for the Catholic, is a good deal more trustworthy than any merely human agency. Thus, within the common situation in this tricky area, the Catholic will be far better off than his non-Catholic fellows. The certitude he feels that he is beginning in the proper way is not based on the reputation of a random individual or committee or college. His response to the Church's advice is englobed by his belief that the Church is no merely human agency, that it has a providential role to play in the affairs of men, that even on matters outside its immediate and proper province, on matters like the study of philosophy, the Church's word can be accepted in a way that is qualitatively distinct from just any reliance on the word of another. Things are not unequivocally bright for the Catholic, however, since a great many things intervene between the advice of the Church, which is quite generic, and the curriculum at St. Philomena's. But before discussing that, there is a prior point that must be taken up. Does it really matter where we begin the study of philosophy?
If learning philosophy implies some kind of trust or faith at its outset, this is merely a moment in what we have called getting involved in a tradition, a moment which must be followed by a judgment in the light of the facts. That is, we have not really learned if we maintain something because someone has said it; rather we must subject what he says to the test of what he is talking about and what he is talking about must be accessible to us independently of what anyone says of it. The faith and trust we have been speaking of here are, accordingly, a vanishing item and the more quickly they vanish the better. If that is so, it does not seem to matter a great deal where we begin the study of philosophy because if we are seriously engaged in it, if we learn, we will be making judgments which cut the umbilical cord, so to speak, we will be making judgments which are autonomous and ours,
Ideally perhaps it would make no difference where we begin the study of philosophy, but it is well to spell out what that "ideally" implies. In the first place, it implies that we are quite unaffected by the authority and reputation of the author we are reading or of the professor we are hearing, but quite dispassionately and without deviation subject what he is saying to the test. Furthermore, it implies that we are quite incapable of being misled, that our mind unerringly goes to the truth of the matter. Finally, and this increases the unreality of the supposed situation, it implies that philosophers generally present what they have to say in a fashion that makes it easy for their readers or listeners to connect it with what is already known. This would demand that their language bears at least a family resemblance to the language of ordinary life, that their problems bear a like resemblance, and so forth. But the common experience of men calls this ideal situation into question. Far more than pure intellect is at play when we subject ourselves to philosophical instruction; we are influenced by non-rational factors not simply to get into the door of the classroom, or into a given author, but long afterward. It is well that we be tentative in passing judgments at the outset of our study; we have to get acclimated, after all, but in the process what we hear becomes familiar and takes on a kind of sanction from that familiarity which is not unlike the component of "common sense" we spoke of in the previous chapter.{3} And consider the philosophers with whom we might begin. We could be introduced to a jargon so unrelated to ordinary life and our pre-philosophical certitudes that it would never occur to us to try to relate the two; in short, rather than passing a judgment we would become indisposed to make judgments. Not only that, but there are many philosophers whose stock in trade consists of casting doubt on the total content of what we have called common sense, philosophers who call into doubt the reality of external objects, who call into doubt our ability to know anything whatsoever with certitude, philosophers who speak to packed halls of their incertitude as to whether they are really there. Of course no one takes this kind of problem seriously, least of all the philosopher who professes to have it. He may spend fifity minutes doubting the reality of the walls, but he always leaves the room by the door. The net effect of this is to induce a game-like attitude, to create the impression that philosophy is the enterprise in which we make believe, in which we utter preposterous things in a patently unserious way. There are instructors of philosophy, and everyone has met them, whose personal lives are a frightful mess but who have taken on with almost messianic zeal the task of calling into question for undergraduates what they are pleased to call "bourgeois morality." The example, it seems to me, is crucial for the suggestion that it really does not matter where we begin the study of philosophy or with whom or with what or how. Consider the philosophical neophyte, an undergraduate at an age when passion is strong and reason easily clouded by emotion; place him in a class where moral values are called into question in a radical fashion, where temperance and chastity are archly discussed as fossils of surpassed emotive attitude toward human life. That what is maintained can be shown to be nonsense doesn't really matter. Our attention must be called to his audience, to the forces that would be at work within young people and which make the position maintained attractive. The morally corruptive effect of such an introduction to philosophy, while not inevitable, is hardly surprising. And, lest this caution seem inimical to the plea that the unexamined life is not worth living, remember that one of the principal targets of Socrates' scorn were teachers who corrupt the morals of the young under the guise of the search for truth.
The best and basic analogue for talk of education is the family, the passing on by parents to their children of what they know to be the case. We begin by trusting our parents and, by extension, our elders generally. Many of the things they tell us we can presume they know, but if we accept them our reason is that our parents said so. Eventually their hope would be that we will come to hold those things without the sanction of parental authority. Now it makes a great deal of difference what we are told at the outset, how we are brought up. Indeed, as Aristotle remarked, it makes all the difference.{4} If we have a well-ordered view of life, we want to pass that on to our children and we would bitterly resent it if someone else undertook to tell our children to act in a way contrary to that in which we are bringing them up. We could of course argue the point with a peer, but we don't argue with our children; we persuade and cajole, we tell them things for their own good, etc. Without a certain kind of disposition inculcated from an early age, it is unlikely that children would grow up to see certain truths about life. There are, in short, subjective dispositions necessary for seeing the way things are in the moral order.
Now something remotely similar to this is operative at the beginning of our formal study of philosophy. Dispositions are acquired, attitudes taken on, which have an influence that is or can be quite far-reaching. All this is on the periphery of philosophy itself, of course, but it is part and parcel of philosophizing. That is a point to which we shall return later, but perhaps enough has been said to indicate why one can be reasonably chary of the contention that it really doesn't matter where we begin the study of philosophy or how.
I want now to make explicit a distinction that has been operative in the foregoing pages, a distinction of which we have particular need at this juncture. Our talk of learning and tradition and even of the trust which characterized the beginning of our formal study of philosophy laid heavy stress on the objectivity of knowledge. What is known is not a personal possession of teacher or learning because it reflects the way things are. That objective reference of knowledge is what permits the learner to separate himself from the trust and faith without which he could hardly begin. This emphasis permits us to speak of philosophy as something autonomous and objective, almost as if it were out-there, independent of human minds. This suggestion could be exaggerated in a way that would make the matter utterly ridiculous, of course; without human minds there would simply be no philosophy. What we wanted to stress, and what must be stressed, is that the criterion of knowledge is the real, that human minds which do philosophy are measured by the way things are, rather than vice versa. The ancients, notably Aristotle, likened the human mind to a simple capacity or potentiality, but a potentiality for all things; in knowledge it is as if the whole of reality could become present to us, that we could, in some sense, become all things.{5} This is not to say that the mind does not contribute to the activity we call knowing. Categories, generalizations, all manners of relations are attributed to things which belong to them only insofar as they are known by us. Man does not exist, only individual men, and although there is a warrant in things for the universal nature the mind enunciates, nothing outside the mind answers as such to human nature conceived as some one thing relating to many individuals. One of Aristotle's complaints against Plato was that he failed to distinguish what belongs to things in themselves and what belongs to them as a consequence of our knowing them. The Platonic idea, Aristotle felt, is merely a projection outside the minds of the universals we form in knowing the individuals in the world. This is an extremely vexed topic, of course, and we mention it now because it provides a first reminder that, even when we stress the objectivity of knowledge, the fact that the real is the measure of true knowledge, we do so out of an awareness that there is a subjective side to knowledge.
The subjective side of knowledge to which we have just drawn attention, that which consists of the relations that attach to things as a result of our knowing them, is what Aristotle meant by logic.{6) It is perfectly possible to have objective knowledge of this subjective complement or component of knowledge, moreover, and while Aristotle would not have thought that the logician was studying things out-there, he would certainly have insisted that the logician is not concerned with the private or arbitrary, with what is subjective in various stronger senses, say mine as opposed to yours. But there is a far wider context to the knowledge that makes up philosophy, a context which calls our attention to the subject who is engaged in this study. To study philosophy is a human act and now, when we want to speak of this human activity, we will employ the term "philosophizing" to designate it.{7} While philosophizing is on the side of the subject and thus may be termed the subjective aspect of philosophy, it is nonetheless something which can be generalized and communicated. It is the objective or shareable aspects of this subjectivity we want to examine now.
Kierkegaard is often looked upon as an opponent of speculative or theoretical thought and consequently of much that has gone by the name philosophy.{8} Actually, this is not wholly true; indeed, when one reflects on Kierkegaard's criticisms of what he calls, variously, Pure Thought, Abstract Thought, and Speculative Thought, it becomes clear that what he is calling attention to is the rather obvious fact that thought involves a thinker. In short, he is inviting us to make just the shift we are trying to make with our distinction between philosophy and philosophizing. As a matter of fact, much of what I want now to propose has been heavily influenced by some fifteen years of study in Kierkegaard. Having said that, however, I want to begin by calling attention to a passage in Aristotle, the ultimate significance of which can easily be overlooked.
At the outset of his Metaphysics, Aristotle attempts to assign a meaning to the term "wisdom" which will enable him to convey what he means by "philosophy," the etymology of which is, of course, the love or pursuit of wisdom. Aristotle has something rather remote and sophisticated in mind when he uses the term "wisdom" to define philosophy, and it is for that very reason that he is intent on attaching his somewhat far-out use of the term to everyday experience and ordinary language. In doing this he gives a kind of panoramic sketch of the ground out of which metaphysics comes. (That is a deliberate invocation of Heidegger.) The much quoted opening sentence of the Metaphyscis is, "All men by nature desire to see or know." That assertion is at once controversial and self-evident. Controversial, if by knowing we think of what goes on in Plato's academy or a modern university and so forth; rather difficult to quarrel with if by knowing we mean, first of all, something as basic as sense perception. Well, it is to sense perception that Aristotle first appeals, and the knowledge or awareness gained by the senses is quickly attached to its practical utility. The senses are instruments without which animals could not get along in this world and, insofar as the value of getting along in this world is an unquestioned assumption of animal life, we can emend Aristotle's opening to make it read, All animals desire to know. To be sure, even when speaking of the external senses, Aristotle introduces his major theme by observing that we take particular delight in seeing even when it is not ordered to some practical end, but apart from that his discussion proceeds with continuing reference to what he considers man shares with animals and, when he moves to peculiarly human activities, his emphasis is on the practical. Of course, in man, sensation has a two-fold function; it is necessary for survival and thus has a practical ordination and it is the root of experience out of which knowledge arises and thus has ultimately a theoretical ordination. But it is know-how that is first gained, cognitive attitudes which enable man to survive, which enable him to establish a society of his fellows and to gain some measure of surcease from the struggle to live. It is with the advent of leisure that theoretical knowledge of a more or less disinterested character become a possibility.
What has this to do with our present inquiry? This, I think, that we can consider each man as recapitulating what Aristotle there describes in terms of social history. Man is a being in the world, he is there among things, and this fact calls for any number of adjustments and attitudes before he undertakes the formal study of philosophy. One does not have to go the whole distance, with Marx, and say that philosophy is merely an ideology created by the practical and economic order, but surely it is true to say that we come to the formal study of philosophy against the background of a long, practical involvement in the world. I am not suggesting that this involvement is mindless; it is here that, by and large, I would locate what we spoke of earlier as common sense; it is here that we acquire both the irrefragable certitudes which no later thought can undermine as well as the myths and emotive interpretations which seem to have as their major purpose to make us at home in the world.
We have already referred to discussions of the historical origins of philosophy out of myth. It has been said that myth is not something which is surpassed once for all, and I would like to turn that suggestion into a reminder that philosophy is but one way of comporting ourselves vis-à-vis reality. Some contemporary thinkers, like Heidegger, have attempted to analyze what it means to be human in the broadest of senses and, if that could be done, doing philosophy might be seen as simply one way of being human, not the first way and, humanly speaking, not the most satisfactory way.{9}
But who in the world would have to be reminded of that? Many philosophers, as it turns out, philosophers who apparently feel they are speaking of man's original and fundamental involvement in the world when they discuss esoteric epistemological problems. Is the objective reality of physical objects the sort of question a man might first ask? By first here we mean chronologically first, that is, as a child or, if you prefer, as primitive man. To imagine this is absurd. We accept the world as where we are; we relate to objects as things to be desired and avoided; we learn to walk and talk and act in myriad ways. All this is simply given; it can neither be questioned by doubt nor constituted by philosophical thought. At the outset, our energies are devoted to keeping a foothold in a world which is indisputably there. Survival may, in certain cultures, be less of a problem than in others but it is always with some degree of effort that we do survive. Now what I get out of such reminders as these, reminders which come most often from those philosophers who are called existentialists, is that man is basically an agent, an actor. Isn't that the import of the first chapter of Aristotle's Metaphysics? Kierkegaard expressed it by saying that man is not basically a knowing subject but an ethical subject, for him to exist is, first of all, basically, and this means from first to last, a matter of becoming what he ought to be.{10} That is the basic configuration of human life and it is into it that we have to place man as knower. A man knows in a context. The knower is an existing man.
The reminder of the human condition which we find in existentialism, particularly in Kierkegaard, has import for both philosophy and philosophizing. Although it is the latter which principally interests us now, a brief word may be said of the former. If man is first of all a doer, if knowledge as it first arises in him is ordered to goods that he more or less automatically seeks, this will have an impact on the more formal pursuit of knowledge which he may undertake with age and leisure. A man struggling to survive could hardly be expected to be assailed by epistemological problems concerning the reality of the external world. Such problems would seem unreal to him, phony, faintly decadent, and in large part he would be right. Right because he is involved in the world in the fundamental way that man is always involved in it, the way in which our first confused certitudes are gained, certitudes that nultimatelyo later experience, no matter how sophisticated, can gainsay, because however obliquely and surreptitiously, it is to this basic experience that all human activity refers. the solipsist voices his theory and writes it down and if hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue, communication is the fatal concession skepticism pays to realism. In short, our philosophical theories, as we earlier urged, have to be in contact with the ineradicable element of common sense; philosophy must begin with those confused certitudes and in part what it is after is clarification as to what those certitudes bear on. The plain man is certain he is alive and that a live man differs from a dead one; he is right even though he would be unable to state what precisely the difference consists of. After centuries of study, perhaps no one can yet state that difference in a wholly satisfactory way. But the living are no less different from the dead; that certitude does not waver in the real world, whatever its fate in some classrooms.{11}
To turn now to philosophizing, we want to examine the implications of the fact that the pursuit of knowledge is a moral act. This seems an odd statement, of course, because we normally want to distinguish between becoming knowledgeable and becoming good. One can be quite expert at geometry and be for all that a deficient human person. Moreover, we don't have to contrast moral action and such abstract knowledge as geometry to see the difference. It is one of the more poignant facts of life that one can know what he ought to do and yet not do it; moral knowledge, knowledge of moral values and rules, must be distinguished from moral action. This is not to say that action is blind and unthinking, but that the knowledge operative in our deeds is different from the reflective knowledge of human action which makes up moral philosophy or ethics. So let us put our opening point this way: the study of ethics is a moral act.
Where does this lead us? If we are seeking knowledge we are seeking something that is a good where by good we mean something perfective of us. Knowledge perfects our mind; knowledge is a good. The point of our distinction between philosophy and philosophizing is that it enables us to see that the activity in which we seek the good of knowledge is but one human activity, that there are goods other than the good of knowledge, that criteria for the pursuit of goods can be recognized and that thereby the pursuit of knowledge is brought within a very broad category of human activity in general. What we should expect, and what it has been argued does emerge, is a hierarchy of values or goods. How then does the good of knowledge compare with the other goods of man? If we revert to Aristotle, we must come up with a double answer here. Let us give the usual answer first. It is characteristic of man that he seeks knowledge for its own sake; thanks to his reason, man's cognitive involvement is qualitatively different from that of other cosmic things. Man, the old definition runs, is a rational animal. Well, then, if reason is man's defining characteristic, the good of reason must be the most appropriate good for man to seek. Now it is interesting that when Aristotle arrives at this point he dwells on the ambiguity of "good of reason."{12} Can't man's rational activity be various things, he asks, can't it mean the perfection of reasoning just as such, on the one hand, and, on the other, the perfection of other activities insofar as they come under the sway of reason? Both the geometer and the carpenter are engaged in rational activity when they perform their proper tasks, but "rational activity" means different things in the two cases. The carpenter is reasoning about activities other than reasoning, he is putting his mind to the driving of nails, the planing of boards, the erection of walls, etc. The geometer accomplishes his task if the reasoning process itself is performed well. Now I want to take the geometer as a symbol of disinterested knowledge, not that the geometer is without interest in knowledge, but that geometrical knowledge is not as such a measure of an activity other than thinking. That is all that is meant by saying that geometrical knowledge is theoretical or disinterested. The rational activity of the carpenter involves a knowledge directive of activities other than thinking, the goal of which activities is, say, sheltering man from the elements. The rational activity of artisans and practical men can be thought of as directed to the most basic goods: survival, food, shelter, etc. These are goods with which man is first of all concerned, with which he must always be concerned. Not only must he seek them, he must seek them in a proper way; not only must he seek them in a proper way; not only must he act, he must act well. As a social being he must perform his activities in the light of his relations with others, his family, his neighbors, his city, his country, etc.
It would be best, of course, if we prolonged this discussion to develop the criteria for doing such deeds well. That is not our precise task now, but we rely on the reader's ability to recognize that even when the carpenter is performing his task as carpenter well we can still say that he shouldn't be doing what he is doing. If he is building barracks at Dachau, for example, few of us would want to marvel at the finesse with which he planes and hammers and saws; we would want to say he shouldn't be doing that. I think we could develop reasons to underpin those judgments. We shall attempt to do this, not in the case of carpentry, but in the case of doing philosophy.
Is it possible to ask how one should go about the study of philosophy where the criteria appealed to when we say the student is performing his task well are not just as such the criteria of the knowledge he is trying to acquire? That is, what would it mean to say that one who is learning geometry and well is not acting as he should? We are thinking of learning here on an analogy with the case of the man who performs well as a carpenter but badly as a man where the different judgments bear on the same act. One can fiddle well while Rome burns. What we have been getting at in this circuitous way is this question: what if any is the relation between moral virtue and the intellectual life, appetitive dispositions and the perfection of the mind?
Our problem could be approached in terms of an issue of current importance, namely, the moral responsibilities of the scientist. Think of the chemist who with great finesse perfects a gas the sole function of which is to destroy life. What is the relation of knowledge to other values, moral values? In working toward a position with regard to such a problem, we must implicitly at least make a judgment on the way in which values other than purely cognitive ones can or cannot take precedence over them. What we were trying to suggest earlier is that such a problem seemingly ought not arise if by definition man is the animal who seeks knowledge and if, accordingly, moral appraisals are to be made with reference to the cognitive good. That is, if the good of knowledge is the overriding good for man, how could any other good take precedence over it and lead to the conclusion that, in given circumstances, the good of knowledge ought not be sought? Let us rediscover the problem in less exalted circumstances. Consider a man who pursues knowledge to the detriment of his health. One who holds that physical well-being is a lesser good than the good of cognitive truth could nevertheless chide another who endangers his health by his pell-mell pursuit of knowledge and, if asked to give the grounds for his reprimand, he would not of course say that health is a greater good than knowledge, but rather something like, without physical well-being you will not long be able to pursue the good of knowledge. In short, health is a condition for the acquisition of the greater good and one might even say that, in certain circumstances, the lesser good would take precedence over the greater good because of one's long-term interest in the greater good. Perhaps this enables us to see how things other than knowledge, goods less than the good of knowledge which is truth, can condition our appraisals of modes of pursuing the greater good. Once more, there is no need to question the absolute hierarchy of values, no need to say that something other than the perfection of man's defining capacity is really man's greater good. Rather, by taking into account the conditions and context of the pursuit of the good, one may, in a foreshortened perspective, seem to rule against the greater good, whereas, in the long haul, it is precisely one's concern for the greater good that explains the appraisal.
Now something like these considerations underlies the old adage primum vivere, deinde philosophare: live first, thence philosophize. This adage, like most adages, is susceptible of any number of interpretations. It could be taken to recommend experience prior to reflection on experience. It could be understood, as it was understood by Unamuno, as a reversal of the Greek hierarchy of values, so that the measure of the worth of knowledge is its import and value for the supreme value, life.{13} But of course if it is a question of human life, as it is for Unamuno, we must ask what the defining characteristics of human life are and we may come up with the Greek answer. To return for a moment to Aristotle at the beginning of his Metaphysics, we might want to say that nothing is more desirable than wisdom, since nothing else is more perfective of man, and yet nothing is less necessary than wisdom.{14} What Aristotle seems to be getting at is the priority of the conditions of philosophy. Until life is secure, at least to some degree, the pursuit of theoretical knowledge will simply not be a live issue. That is why the practical activities with reference to which Aristotle begins his discussion of man's natural desire for knowledge take chronological precedence over the theoretical; the necessities of life are not merely necessary conditions for any less interested human activity, as for example the fine arts and theoretical knowledge, they are necessities as well in the sense that here man is not free, is bound. This seems to underlie the designation of some of these activities as servile arts and the servility in question is not unrelated to the needs and demands of the body. Once these necessities were secured, man was free for other pursuits, for pursuits which came to be called liberal: the liberal arts, the artes humaniores or humanities, were more typically human not because they were more basic but because they were more proportionate to man's defining spiritual element.
The chronological priority of goods less than man's chief good is the basis for appraisals which favor these goods over the purely cognitive good although, as we have suggested, the ultimate ground of such appraisals may very well be the cognitive good which is temporarily and teleologically over-ridden. Later we will want to indicate other corollaries of this chronological priority of goods man shares with lesser creatures, corollaries more intrinsically relevant to philosophy since they have to do with theory of knowledge and philosophical terminology. For the moment, the point we have been trying to make can be summarized in the following way. In discussing philosophizing, the process whereby we pursue knowledge and truth, reference is made to goods extrinsic to philosophy, to goods other than the perfection of the mind, and appraisals made. The pursuit of knowledge as a human activity must be undertaken with regard to goods and values other than the good of knowledge itself. This does not entail that these other goods thereby become intrinsic to philosophy, but respect for them, taking them into account, is essential to philosophizing. This is what we meant by saying that philosophizing is a human act and that it involves judgments which are essentially moral.
Since it is a topic which is seldom discussed nowadays,{15} although this was not always the case, we wish to devote a few lines to the relationship between moral goodness and the intellectual life. The strongest way to raise the question is to ask whether a bad man could be a good moral philosopher, but rather than treat the subject abstractly, we shall do so by reference to Plato's Phaedo.
The setting of this dialogue of Plato is the death cell of Socrates and the question of the dialogue centers on the immortality of the soul. In a discussion which attaches to attempts to prove the soul's immortality, Socrates and his friends discuss the philosopher and philosophy. We are there given a description of philosophy which seldom fails to surprise the reader. Philosophy, we are told, is the study of death, a preparation for death, a kind of mimicking of the condition of the dead. In order to grasp the meaning of this seemingly bizarre description, we must recall the main lines of Plato's thought on knowledge. Plato held that truly to know is to know what cannot be otherwise; that is, the object of knowledge must be unchanging and necessary. If this were not so, we could claim to know something which by the morrow would be otherwise than we thought it to be. One has only to consider mathematics to gather Plato's point. If one has achieved a geometrical demonstration he can express a statement and the reason for it and what he says is considered not simply to have been that way, it is not merely thought that it will be that way; rather, one judges that it is that way. timelessly, unchangeably, and so forth. Since Plato had no doubt that knowledge in this strict sense is possible, he had only to isolate its objects. Two possible candidates are rejected. First of all, Plato takes it to be quite obvious that the sensible things of this world cannot be objects of knowledge in the full sense. Sensible, physical things are by definition changeable things -- Plato goes so far as to say, in the Theaetetus, that they are in a constant state of flux, even that they are flux. Second, it might occur to us that our concepts are what we know and that these have sufficient fixity and freedom from change to be deemed necessary. Plato gives this suggestion no serious attention at all and when it is put forward in the Parmenides he simply rejects it. Perhaps it was because our concepts are formed, come to be, and can subsequently be lost or forgotten that Plato dismissed them as grounds of knowledge in the strict sense. At any rate, dismiss them he did and if he were going to retain his belief that we can have knowledge in the strict sense, he had to seek its objects elsewhere than in physical things or in mental concepts. In some such way we can imagine the Platonic doctrine of forms or ideas emerging. When in learning geometry we come to know truths about the triangle, the object of this knowledge is neither the figure drawn in the sand nor our mental image. It is triangle, of course, even the triangle or triangularity that we know and that is something immaterial, changeless, necessary. Plato knows where it is not and what it is not and that is sufficient; he can say of it that it is separate, that is, elsewhere. The very heart of Plato's philosophy is here; he has no doubt that there are objects of knowledge, the forms or ideas. he is aware of the difficulties of the doctrine; he says in the Seventh Letter that nowhere has he written down a proof of their existence. More often than not, what he will say, is that, unless there are ideas, knowledge and philosophy would be impossible -- which he takes to be a reductio ad absurdum.
What has this to do with the description of philosophy as the study of death or with our larger question of the relation between morality and knowledge? Sensible things are not objects of knowledge for Plato; they may be occasions of knowledge, reminding us of the idea or form they faintly imitate. Sensible things are objects of perception or sensation and Plato sets up a proportionality, Sensation : Sensible things :: Knowledge : Ideas. This has as a result the linking of sensible things and body, on the one hand, and ideas with mind or soul. Furthermore, in the Phaedo, Plato may be seen to use sensation in an ambiguous way; it is not only perception of physical things, it is also sensuality, the desire for, the tendency toward physical things. But the appetitive move toward the things of this world binds us to them, makes us like them, clouds the eye of the soul so that it becomes blind to true reality, the realm of the ideas. Well, we can see the consequence. In order to achieve true knowledge, we must turn away from sensation, both in its cognitive aspect as perception and in its emotive or passional aspect as sensuality. The seeker of knowledge must conquer the body; therefore, he must acquire moral virtue which seems to be for Plato a kind of suppression of the corporeal. Thus the the philosopher in whom the soul has achieved independence of and separation from the body is like the dead, that is, like the released soul, freed from its incarceration in the body. Of course, this can be achieved only imperfectly in this life, so the soul of the philosopher longs for the full freedom of death.
All of this is well known to readers of Plato, of course, but what do we make of it? There are a number of clichés often invoked to defuse Plato's message. For the Greeks, philosophy was a way of life; the Phaedo exhibits in a striking way the Pythagorean influence on Plato; we are faced here with the religious as opposed to the scientific strand in Greek thought. And so forth. All too often these clichés are taken to explain something, even to explain it away. The final remark, for instance, suggests that poor Plato has not yet traveled an adequate distance from the myth and theology out of which philosophy arose. The first two remarks can have a double import. First, they can be used to stress the fact that for Christians the way of life could no longer be what philosophy means for the Greeks. Second, and this is never really developed, so far as I know, the suggestion seems to be that we in our wisdom have succeeded in isolating philosophy from a moral context, that for us philosophy is an expertise which can be gained regardless of one's moral condition and carried on perfectly well in utter independence of one's moral character. We will be returning in a moment to the problem of Christianity and philosophy, but now we want to examine the view that philosophy is a morally neutral expertise.
Let us begin by stressing the plausibility of the position. Isn't it the case that one can be a perfectly good mathematician and a reprehensible man? There has been much discussion of the artist in this regard. To be a good artist and to be a good man are clearly not one and the same thing. Well, isn't the same true of the mathematician, the physicist, the biologist, etc.? An affirmative answer seems demanded and, with few qualifications, we give an affirmative answer to the question. The qualifications are nonetheless important. Whether or not the scientist is morally good, in order for him to be a scientist, to learn science, to carry on as a scientist, he must continually make moral judgments that are relevant to his pursuit of scientific knowledge. In short, our concession is simply that the scientist may be morally bad, not that to be a scientist is utterly independent, for this man, from a whole host of moral judgments. In the case of the artist, for example, we often speak of great sacrifices made for art and surely part of what we are saying is that he makes judgments, arranges his life practically with references to his art, and that these judgments are not of the same sort as those he makes when he is making an artifact. To spell this out: to decide to live in a garret, to decide against marriage and family life, for the sake of one's art, is not the same kind of judgment the painter makes when he is composing a picture and chooses this color, this arrangement, and so forth. It is not the canons of art which are appealed to in a garret (one could get the north light on the first floor), eschewing marriage, and the like. It is not the principles of physics which govern the choice of DuPont over MIT, Notre Dame over Cape Kennedy, etc. These practical decisions are made with reference to moral principles and they may be good or bad, more or less good and more or less bad; moreover, at least within a given range, they need not affect the knowing and judgments which do make reference to the principles of the science.
As a first step, then, we can say that the perfection of knowledge can be achieved without dependence on moral goodness. This does not mean, however, that the attainment of knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge, is an activity that can be detached from a whole host of practical judgments, many of them moral, all of them susceptible of extra-scientific appraisal. As a second step in this inquiry, let us consider whether or not moral turpitude, which is extrinsic to knowledge in the sense of science, can be inimical to the achievement or practice of science. This is to come at the problem by the back door, but negatives often have a way of illumining the positive. Surely, as soon as we ask the question, the answer comes crowding in. A thoroughly intemperate man, a drunk, could be because of his vice incapable of carrying on in the laboratory. An artist who becomes culpably addicted to drugs might find the practice of his art difficult; he might become so indifferent to it that he forgets all about it. Less dramatic vices can have their influence on the intellectual life; vices such as vanity blind us to flaws in our own views, make us impervious to pertinent criticism and determined to defend our own views at all costs, whatever the evidence and arguments. There is no need to labor the point. It is quite evident that moral vice, which is not just as such an intellectual fault, in the sense that it is quite different from falsehood, can have a deleterious effect on the intellectual life, can impede our achievement of the perfection of knowledge.
With this as background, we can perhaps regain the Platonic or, more generally, the Greek vantage point. If moral vice can have the effect of impeding our quest for knowledge, can moral virtue facilitate this quest? Plato's position can perhaps best be arrived at in this fashion. Granted that to be a good mathematician is not just as such to be a good man and granted, too, that that to be a good man is not tantamount to being a good mathematician, is it not the case nevertheless that the ideal combination would be that of the good man and the good mathematician? It seems that Plato, and Aristotle, too, found it difficult to grasp the idea that a man might seriously seek the perfection of knowledge without at the same time concerning himself with the perfection of his choices and practical decisions. An historical basis for their tendency to wed the two concerns can be found in their attitude toward the Sophist; both men saw in sophistry the perversion of the intellectual by bad desire, the desire for fame, the desire to win the argument, the desire for money. This would suggest that one must desire the truth well, desire knowledge well, since to desire it badly, immoderately, unvirtuously led to the defeat of the desire. Notice that this means that not only should desires for goods other than knowledge be moderated, that is, become subject to virtue, but that even our desire for and pursuit of knowledge should become subject of virtue. This is not simply a plea for intellectual virtue, that is, the determination of thinking toward its proper object, truth, but a plea for moral virtues which have a special relevance for the intellectual life.
Once one thinks about it, there is surely nothing surprising in the suggestion that one's moral attitudes are influential in the pursuit of knowledge. When we exhort students to read carefully, to avoid precipitous judgments or to concentrate their efforts rather than disperse them, we are commending attitudes which can safely be called moral. Young people are urged to acquire good study habits, to discipline themselves and dispose their time prudently. As it happens, scattered through Aquinas' Summa theologiae are a number of discussions having to do with moral attitudes important for the acquisition of intellectual perfection. For example, when Aquinas is talking about prudence or practical wisdom (Aristotle's phronesis), he introduces the notion of docility. His interest in it is chiefly with respect to its necessity for moral virtue and he emphasizes the benefit to be gained from listening to and learning from our elders in making practical decisions. Nevertheless, he alludes to its importance for the acquisition of intellectual virtue.{16} His discussion of precipitousness also has rather obvious application to their intellectual order.{17} But without a doubt the most interesting and important discussions for our purposes are those concerned with studiousness and curiosity. The first of these is an instance of temperance which is generically a moderation of appetite or desire. This moderation is necessary, Aquinas suggests, lest we desire to excess what we naturally desire; he gives as examples our natural desire for food and drink. Then, citing the opening sentence of the Metaphysics, that all men by nature desire to know, Aquinas says that studiousness is precisely the moderation of this natural desire.{18} The immoderate desire for knowledge is what Aquinas means by curiosity and his discussion of this vice, opposed to the virtue of studiousness, is of particular interest to us at this juncture.{19}
Reminding us that studiousness is not directly related to knowledge itself, but rather to the pursuit of and desire for knowledge, since judgments about knowledge are one thing and judgments about its pursuit another, St. Thomas points out that knowledge of the truth is just as such a good for man. The reasoning behind this is the teleology of man's defining capacity which is reason; its actualization, its perfection or good, is precisely knowledge of the truth. But, while of itself good, knowledge of the truth can be accidentally bad by reason of its consequences -- if it is the occasion for pride and vanity, for example. Aquinas cites the the Epistle to the Corinthians (VIII.I), scientia inflat: knowledge puffs up. Furthermore, if one uses knowledge for a bad purpose, the knowledge could be judged accidentally bad. Now Aquinas is not concerned with knowledge so regarded in his discussion of curiosity; it is not knowledge but the desire and pursuit of knowledge which is the locus for studiousness and curiosity.
The basic assumption here is that the desire or pursuit of truth can be well ordered or perverse. In connection with foregoing, St. Thomas observes that one might pursue knowledge because of some consequence of its possession, which consequence is evil. Thus, I might seek knowledge in order to lord it over my fellows, in order to take pride in it and to consider myself not like the rest of men. Furthermore, I might seek to acquire some knowledge or expertise in order to achieve monetary success and, with it, a pagan mode of existence. At the outset, then, Aquinas speaks of a vicious desire for knowledge which is such, not because knowledge is evil, but because what one is really seeking is a reprehensible concomitant of knowledge.
Having made this point, Aquinas goes on to discuss four ways in which a moral fault arises from an inordinate desire for learning truth. The first may be described as a violation of the principle, first things first. Aquinas quotes St. Jerome lamenting priests whose principal interest is secular drama and amorous and bucolic songs to the detriment of their knowledge of Scripture. Because of their office, priests take on obligations with respect to possible objects of knowledge, some knowledge being more incumbent upon them than other, and a violation of this order is blameworthy. Imagine a priest who need cede to no one in knowledge of the James Bond novels but who referred you to a Scripture scholar when you asked him about the Gospel. Imagine a man who had contracted to teach physics and who devotes the bulk of his time to a translation of Catullus begun in prep school to the detriment of the field in which he has engaged himself to excel.
A second example of inordinate desire for knowledge is the pursuit of illicit knowledge, e.g., astrology. The appraisal of knowledge as illicit is made here by appeal to faith, and Aquinas quotes Augustine as wondering whether some philosophers are not impeded from believing because of their interest in demons and spirits. Knowledge of the occult, whether judged to be nonsense from a religious or from another point of view, is sought after culpably. I suppose we would say, in a secular vein, that one is wasting his time, perverting the proper use of his mind, if he spends his days trying to predict the future or to make contact with spirits or to devise a foolproof gambling system. Aquinas' third example of curiosity -- and we are here faced with an assessment which may seem to be properly religious although it is in keeping with the Greek conception of philosophy -- is one who seeks knowledge of creatures without referring that knowledge to their creator. We might say that a deliberate and a priori restriction of intellectual interest to the finite, to the neutral, existentially speaking, is regarded as a vice by Aquinas. Such a judgment involves an attitude toward the whole context of man's pursuit of knowledge. Why is man a knower? Why has be been given this capacity? What is the ultimate import of his natural desire to know? If that desire cannot be pursued pell-mell, as it cannot, to what do we appeal in directing it? In doing so, we are making normative judgments whose function is to guide a reflective quest of knowledge, and here attitudes toward the hierarchy of objects of knowledge are inevitable. We may seem to be confining ourselves to proximate and pragmatic criteria when we give advice to others as to the order they should follow in study. The objective that may guide our advice could be academic (you need three more credits to graduate) or the broader and more remote target of career and income (philosophy majors usually end up on the dole), but Aquinas invites our attention to more encompassing criteria. It is as if there is involved in the immediate rules and guidelines we may suggest at least an implicit attitude toward what man is, what life is all about. In its original scope philosophy had as a task to explore just such questions and the answers to them control advice one would give a beginner concerning the motivation for philosophizing. We may be made uneasy by the suggestion that our advice to the young presupposes that we have made such inquiries, but if we have not, how do we justify our justifications for this line of study or that? In all kinds of ways, certainly, which in a foreshortened perspective function adequately enough. But the question, "Why should I seek knowledge at all?" is a good one and we must think of it as raised by one actually pursuing knowledge, one who has felt the attraction of truth, if we are to appreciate how interesting the question is. We will be returning to this third instance of curiosity mentioned by Aquinas when we raise explicitly the question of what relation should obtain between divine faith and the pursuit of knowledge.
A fourth and final instance of the inordinate pursuit of knowledge is one who seeks knowledge beyond his proper capacities. One of the tasks of graduate faculties is to warn ill-equipped aspirants away from an area of scholarship. A student may have the will, the desire, but when his professors become rather sure that he has not the talent to justify pursuing the desire, they will tel him to turn his efforts in another direction. If such a student should ignore qualified advice and the significance of experienced failure, we would rightly feel his continued quest has the makings of a moral fault.
I suspect that the preceding will strike as strange what we vaguely call the modern mind. It is relatively easy, as I have tried to do, to turn the types of curiosity Aquinas mentions into descriptions of rather readily recognizable phenomena. The man who ignores his contractual obligations and devotes his energies and time as an amateur to a field other than his professional one; the man who wastes his time seeking a kind of knowledge which, by one criterion or another, we judge to be illicit or non-existent; the man who persists in the study of a subject he has not the wit to master -- we have all, alas, encountered such men. We might write them off as neurotic and they may be neurotic; Aquinas tends to regard such mistakes first of all as instances of morally culpable desire. The latter may lead to the former; we may be faced with a subtle mixture of the two. But surely it should not strain our imagination to see that there may be reasons short of mental illness to explain why a person acts in violation of what is for us common sense. He just may be morally culpable and deserving of blame. He may, of course,. be me and, while I am reluctant to impute blame to others, I would prefer to regard myself as morally at fault rather than the victim of putative forces over which I have no control. Think of this discussion as a self-examination and we break down the resistance we may have to seeing that in our pursuit of knowledge things may not be as they ought to be.
Before turning to the problem toward which this whole chapter has been tending, the problem which is summarized in the phrase Christian Philosophy, let us recapitulate briefly what has gone before. I wanted to say that, in order to begin the study of philosophy, at least when the beginning is not a matter of mere chance, we tend to take the advice of others as to the best way to begin, or at least a good and possible way of beginning. This does not mean, of course, that we are terribly conscious of what we are doing, it does not mean that we reflect on the fact that we are trusting others and assess the reasonableness of doing so. But we can look back on the fact and see that that is indeed what we were doing and can then judge that it was reasonable to so. Part of the reasonableness of trust resides in its inevitability, of course, but then we didn't follow just any advice. We didn't stop strangers on the street and ask them where we should go to school or what courses we should enroll in. More likely, we trusted people whose recognized function it is to give such advice. We may seek advice about advisers, and it would be the rare student who doesn't, but this is to enlarge the circle of advisers rather than to break out of it. If it is reasonable to trust others as to how we should begin the study of philosophy, the reasons which constitute this reasonableness are not just as such philosophical reasons. What we are taking advice on is where we might go to get philosophical reasons. In short, I wanted to argue that, when we think of philosophizing, the study of philosophy, rather than of philosophy just as such, we are inevitably in an area where pre-philosophical or extra-philosophical reasons are essentially involved and that these reasons govern decisions we make concerning the deployment of time and effort. Should we confine ourselves to the condition of those who seek to learn in academe, we are confronted with a pretty universal and common and unavoidable situation where trust is the mark of the tyro. It is with reference to this common situation that we will want to discuss the specific situation of the student in a Catholic college. Having opened the way to a distinction between philosophy and philosophizing, where the latter term covered a host of human acts which are the concrete context of philosophy, the decisions whereby we pursue the knowledge which constitutes philosophy, we wanted to go the whole distance and consider the moral overtones of philosophizing. This we regarded as a discussion which is nowadays unusual although in ancient and medieval times it was introduced without fanfare and apology as an obvious object of interest. The older and more commodious attitude involved talking of the relationship between moral virtue and vice and the acquisition or attainment of the object of study. We tried to remove some of the strangeness of such considerations by suggesting continuing concerns which answer to the older talk of the virtues and vices of the intellectual. In the course of transposing such matters into less alarming terminology, into everyday academic occurrences, we hope to show that it is still a widespread practice to commend appropriate moral virtues (e. g., good study habits) and warn against certain vices (e.g., don't try to learn everything at once).
If there is an upshot to the foregoing, it is this. It is not peculiar to Catholics to recognize the importance of extra-philosophical criteria in talking about the learning of philosophy since some kind of trust or acceptance on the part of the student, based on principles other than those controlling a given subject matter, is a basic assumption of the organization of institutions of learning. Furthermore, though the roots of such may go unexamined, we do quite generally give advice to students that can only be called moral and which is given because of its peculiar relevance to the pursuit of knowledge.
Since what we are engaged on in this essay is, in great part, the setting down of truisms too easily forgotten, we are not in the least embarrassed by the recognition that what we have been describing is neither news nor surprising. The reader will of course appreciate that, insofar as the intellectual life is discussed as if it were the activity of a disembodied mind, an activity which somehow simply starts, perhaps from a presuppositionless beginning, we are confronted with something worse than fantasy. Worse, because, unlike fantasy, such talk is invariably dangerous, humanly dangerous. The pursuit of knowledge is a human activity and it must be discussed as a human activity; it takes place in a context where desires other than that for knowledge are operative and must be taken into account; it takes place against a background of a practical involvement in the world and that involvement has importance both for the initial questions of philosophy and for its terminology. A philosophical argument is valid, its conclusion true or false, independently of the vice or virtue of the knower, but the route to the argument involves any number of judgments and decisions which are essentially moral. We may not be sufficiently dismayed by the possibility that we may praise an argument and abhor the arguer; Plato and Aristotle seem disinclined to believe the possibility would often be realized. Certainly it would be an infrequent occurrence if we, like they, described philosophy in terms of man's quest for perfection and came to see how odious it is for a man to fail to be a good man and achieve, partially, his perfection as a knower.
Extra-philosophical attitudes are constitutive of philosophizing if not of philosophy; one who sees the distinction between philosophy and philosophizing, and the inevitable influence of the latter on the former, is not going to be struck dumb by our asking what influence religious faith has on philosophy. If practical and moral attitudes have a generally recognized influence on our pursuit of knowledge, it is only to be expected that a commitment as total and all-embracing as religious belief will also have an influence. The impingement of faith on reason and vice versa has been one of the most discussed questions since the beginning of the Christian era, certainly, and while it may seem to have been resolved more or less satisfactorily in the so-called ages of faith, perhaps most articulately in the medieval period, the modern age of philosophy begins with explicit efforts to dissociate reason from faith and faith from reason with consequences for theology which are not difficult to descry and decry; that this may have had a deleterious effect on philosophy itself is the surprising suggestion of many who have argued, in recent years, for what they call Christian philosophy one by one. Rather, having provided a sketch of the context of the discussion, we shall make soundings in the literature, and make suggestions of our own with respect to the possibility and even desirability of Christian philosophy.
At the outset of this chapter we spoke of faith in the broad sense of one man's trust in another. To believe, we pointed out, is both to believe someone and something. In this sense of believe, one can see that it would be odd to believe what one knows, since reliance on another's word for what one knows is superfluous or absurd. so, if to believe is to take someone's word as the warrant holding something, we could, for purposes of illustration, say that the nexus between the predicate and subject of the statement expressing which is believed is not evidence, not the nature of the objects spoken about, but precisely another's assurance that a connection between the objects exists. If a chemist tells me a substance is composed of such-and-such elements, I, who have never made the analysis in question, can accept the statement as true. That is, believe it to be true. Let us pretend that I am capable of making the analysis involved and could, on demand, pass from belief to knowledge with respect to the statement in question. For one reason or another, we do not always make that transition; we are content to believe all kinds of things we could know. Life would be impossible without such beliefs; without the majority of them remaining terminal. Few of us will ever verify the map of our city let alone that of our state or country, but we are not visited by a sense of the riskiness of life when we give directions to travelers, including ourselves, on the basis of such maps. Many things we believe in this way are not verified by us due to physical difficulties, due to restricted travel or laboratory time. We may simply lack the talent or training to pass from belief to knowledge. Nevertheless, in principle at least, all such beliefs bear on truths knowable and not merely believable by men.
The Christian faith differs from faith or belief in the common meaning of the terms in several ways.{20} First of all, the one whom we believe is no mere man, but God revealing. Second, what we believe, in the strong sense here, is something we are incapable of knowing or understanding in this life. The Christian can be quite clear as to what he believes and equally clear that he does not understand it. For example, Jesus Christ is truly God and truly man. He died the death of a man and we can say, on that basis, that God died. But no orthodox Christian ever maintained that he understood the union in Christ of the divine and human natures. If he understood it, he would not have to believe it, but in this life the only basis for maintaining that Christ is both God and man is to believe, to take His word for it. So too to accept as true that there are three Persons in the Divine nature can only be done on the basis of belief. No living man has ever understood the Trinity and no living man ever will. So the Christian believes God, believes Christ and the Church Christ founded, and what he believes is enunciated in creeds, discussed by theologians, and defined by the Church. If we consider the truths the Christian believes in believing God we are struck by the fact that they impinge upon and overlap and sometimes seem to come in conflict with what men know or claim to know apart from God's revelation. The purpose of human life, sanctions for human behavior, recommended modes of action, the import of the cosmos in its origin and destiny are merely some of the things about which the Christian has rather decided views on the basis of his faith. Obviously it is possible to have views on the same matters independently of faith, a kind of test of which is had by appeal to the philosophy of pagans, developed in ignorance of the Jewish religion and prior to the coming of Christ.
Out of the myriad consequences of these hints at difficulties, let us select several. What if we should say that, thanks to our Christian faith, we have a world view, theories of man and cosmos and the destiny of each, rules for behavior, a vast pattern of interpretation of reality. Like some of the early Fathers, we might then say that we possess, thanks to revelation, thanks to Christ, what the pagans sought and only imperfectly found, namely, a complete philosophy. On this view, Christian belief replaces philosophy so far as believers are concerned and any impulse to do what philosophers did, perhaps even to read their writings, must be regarded as a temptation. In Christ the believer has the Way, the Truth, and the Life. What possible need could he have for anything else?
On the other hand, one might regard Christianity as consisting of rituals and moral attitudes and a nest of odd propositions which are said to be true in some Pickwickian sense: they are true if you accept them but there is no evidence that really supports them, the believer insists, which can function apart from accepting the evidence as supporting the truths. The "truths" of faith thus seem a queer sort of unverifiable truth and, as such, one may either choose not to suppress his laughter and disdain or, in a mood of pluralistic liberalism, honor the right of others to believe in any nonsense they like so long as they recognize that beliefs have nothing to do with knowledge. Believers have been attracted by this possibility of a modus vivendi between faith and knowledge. Why not consider the two utterly heterogenous and say that knowledge can neither support faith nor refute it? Faith is simply a quite different use of the mind, for the believer a higher use, for the critical non-believer a depraved or primitive one. But in any case the twain will never meet.
Where would this second possibility lead us? Well, we might say that we know and can prove that, for man, death is not the end, and that this is a statement which is utterly without connection with the Christian's belief that death will bring with it a judgment at which he will be held accountable for his deeds in life and which will decide his eternal happiness or unhappiness. But what if a philosopher claims to know and to be able to prove that death is the end, that he cannot recognize as even remotely meaningful contrary claims. Wouldn't the Christian who conceded the cogency of such discourse and nonetheless blissfully continued to believe that death is not the end seem odd? And I mean odd to other believers as well as to non-believers?
If among the things the Christian believes objects are mentioned which also come up in the discourse of non-believers, it seems fair to ask that the believer consider it something of a duty on his part to compare belief statements about a given object and knowledge statements about the same object, particularly when the statements seem at variance with one another. This is surely not a task that can be laid at the doorstep of the non-believer nor does it seem to be a task that can simply be shrugged off as a temptation or distraction. If only because it could distract someone else right out of his faith, the competent believer will see an obligation to discuss the matter. And, it is to be hoped, his discussion of the matter will make sense to the non-believer as well as to his fellow believers. Speaking as generically as we are, we may seem to be suggesting that all such inquiries could come out the same way. That is, one might expect that a believer who occupies himself with knowledge claims about objects concerning which he believes certain truths will inevitably say that nothing on the level of knowledge can really have the slightest influence on faith regardless of how the matter originally appeared. Now it is possible that this would often be the result of such an investigation, but I think there is something fishy about the claim that things will always turn out this way. I think we are right in thinking that some things we know or claim to know are related to what we believe, even though we would not want to say that what we know entails faith. The reason we would not want to say that knowledge entails faith is that then Christianity would seem to be parading itself as a body of knowledge acquired through their own efforts by a group of highly talented thinkers. All we have to do is remind ourselves of the group Christ surrounded himself with -- and surrounds himself with today? -- to see how preposterous that claim is. Faith is not an intellectual accomplishment that discriminates between men on the basis of natural talent. men of great natural talent and men of little or no natural talent are at bottom equal with respect to the faith -- unless we want to say, with Kierkegaard, that is more difficult for the talented rather than less difficult.{21} Christ rose from the dead. Why not? He is God and God made the world and surely rising from the dead is less difficult than making the living and non-living from nothing. But this invocation of God's act as artificer of the universe in an appeal to an immensely difficult matter, perhaps as dark from the point of view of accessibility to our minds as the Resurrection. In either case, creation in time or the resurrection of the dead, we are presented with claims which boggle the mind. The believer who has the time and the talent will, in mediating on what he believes, inevitably try to put it into relation with what he knows. He believes without question that the world is totally dependent on the creative act of God. But what precisely does that mean? And, if the world is God's artifact, will not he as believer feel a special impulse to want to know as much about it as he can? It would be hard to document the reality of that impulse historically, of course, but what about now? Is science saying things about the same world the believer holds is the effect of God? Well, what does "same" mean here, and, if there are different "worlds," what do we mean by "different" and how do they compare?
If philosophy is defined in terms of knowledge gained with reference only to principles available to the human mind without special divine aid and if, on the other hand, the knowledge of faith is precisely dependent upon special divine aid, philosophy and faith, philosophy and theology, are quite distinct. Certainly with respect to philosophy we would consider it an unwarranted transgression of genera if an argument revealed itself to be essentially dependent for its cogency and acceptance on an item of faith. On this basis, the phrase Christian philosophy could be given rather short shrift. It is on a par, we might want to say, with such phrases as American philosophy, Irish philosophy, even male philosophy. The connection in the phrase is purely adventitious. It happens that certain arguments and theories have been propounded by Americans or Irishmen or males and this undeniable historical fact has nothing whatever to do with the content of what is maintained, if it is forceful, if it is true. Of course, if it is not true, we may, if we are so inclined, look into the fact that an American said it to see if that provides extenuating circumstances. Finally, I think we want to say that, even if an argument has been formulated by an American, even if we think being an American disposed one to become interested in the area of the argument, one need not be an American to assess the argument, to accept it as true, or reject it as false. When argument is successful, in other words, we can pretty safely ignore the accidental characteristics of its originator.
There have been some who were willing to handle the problem of Christian philosophy in just this way. There are philosophical arguments, tenets, and truths which happen to have been hit upon in a Christian milieu by Christians but precisely to the degree that the arguments are cogent, the tenets tenable, and the truths evidently such, we need make no allusion to the social milieu or to the religious beliefs of their proponents. I don't think the matter is quite that simple but I want to proceed for the moment as if this were unequivocally true. What I would be conceding then is that, from the point of view of content, philosophy is uninfluenced by faith, that what is known is simply different from what is believed. Nevertheless, appeal could here be made to our earlier distinction between philosophy and philosophizing and the question put this way: is religious faith accidental to the philosophizing of the believer?
What I want to do is to transpose the problem of Christian philosophy to the level where we would rather speak of the Christian philosopher. Being a Christian should surely have a discernible effect on our philosophizing, if only because, as St. Paul put it, our minds have been rendered captive by faith. But in that captivity we are put in possession of the truth that frees so we are at the least rather equivocal bondsmen. Faith may perhaps be described as an intellectual attitude whereby, under the influence of our will, moved by grace, we accept as true what we do not and cannot understand. So described, faith is a possession of the believer; we also speak of the faith, what is believed, the object of belief. Ultimately this is someone, God, but it is also what God has told us. God has told us much about himself and about the relation of the world and man to himself, and the believer accepts all these things because God has revealed them -- "the whole bag of tricks," as a Graham Greene character not irreverently put it. That is the formality under which he accepts them, God's word; that is why he cannot pick and choose among the things presented for his acceptance. Such picking and choosing is what defines the heretic who is, etymologically, choosy. But on what basis does he choose? On some basis other than the authority of God; perhaps he looks for what is more agreeable to him, less embarrassing, not so far-out. Strictly speaking, such a man does not have faith in the strong sense if faith in the strong sense is accepting on God's word.
Faith is in some sense always and essentially blind if it is the acceptance of things unseen. Nevertheless, because faith is a disposition of mind and it is thanks to mind that we are inquiring beings, questioning beings, the believer soon senses that his mind is an arena of apparently incompatible attitudes. He accepts without question and yet, because he is the kind of being God has made him, he must inquire into and reflect on what he believes. His becomes a faith seeking understanding, a fides quaerens intellectum. The presence of inquiry and questioning within a firm adherence to what God has revealed is the source, Aquinas says, of theology.{23} Perhaps we ought not too quickly think of theology as an academic discipline, a kind of learned prowess; Aquinas saw it in continuity with the meditation, the contemplation of the spiritual life. For him, theology was not something undertaken during a kind of recess from the spiritual life; it was, or should be, an expression of the spiritual life. The fruit of the believer's effort to plumb the object of his faith, to draw near to it with his whole being, mind, and heart. I think it is fair to say that for Aquinas, theology as he engaged in it, was one mode of the spiritual life. Progress in the spiritual life is not merely a function of our natural capacities and to be a theologian requires a good deal of natural talent. Some of the greatest saints were without learning in any formal sense, but they had the scientia crucis, the knowledge of the cross, a lived knowledge which was almost wholly a gift. Surely the ideal would be the person who had both the learning of the theologian and contemplative gifts. St. Thomas was such a one and this fact is not without importance when we try to assess the role the Church has assigned him.{23}
So far, what we have said is that the Christian will feel a natural impulse to inquire into his faith and that this can issue, given a certain natural talent and learning, in what is called theology. A loose but defensible description of theology is the following. Theology is an intellectual effort undertaken by believers and for other believers to put revealed truths into relation with what man can know apart from revelation. By believers, because only they could feel the sustained impulse to undertake the inquiry, only they accept as true the principles of the inquiry; it is for believers, because the function of theology is not to provide faith to those who do not have it or to prove that, given such and such a naturally known truth, a believed truth follows necessarily. Faith is the presupposition of theology, not its effect. If the theologian appears to address every man, this is because he knows that in revelation God speaks to us all and not merely to those who have already received the grace, the ears to hear. Reading theology may be the occasion God used to give someone faith but then God can employ just about any event or activity as an occasion for granting this gift. It is not the function of theology to create belief; no man can give faith to another, and theology is a human product.
I have gone into this matter at some length -- though it is its sinful brevity that bothers me -- in order to have a contrast for philosophy. Theology is not philosophy, not because theology is an activity of believers and philosophy is not, but because of the difference in the intrinsic assumptions of the two disciplines. A theological argument presupposes faith because only faith gives the nexus between the components of believed statements. No philosophical argument can be intrinsically reliant on a statement held on faith, whether this be human or divine faith. If a philosophical argument proves anything, this can be seen, in principle, by any man whether or not he has religious faith. What we demand of philosophy, of knowledge, of science, is evidence and cogency. This does not of course require that every philosophical or scientific argument be necessarily conclusive. Perhaps the bulk of our arguments are at best probable, but that probability should be read in terms of the things we are speaking of; it is by appeal to those objects that the force of the argument, whatever its degree, must be read.
If we now ask whether the Christian can devise philosophical or scientific arguments, the quickest way to get an answer would be to find objects of knowledge about which nothing specific has been revealed. Here the Christian will be in the same condition as any man; if he gains reasonable convictions with respect to those objects he must be prepared to sustain them by appeal to what anyone can know about those objects. The mathematics, physics, or logic of the Christian should be indistinguishable from that of the non-Christian and from that of the pagan. Where the problem seems to arise is in areas where the objects under consideration are ones about which Christian already believes something. Consider the questions mentioned earlier, those bearing on the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. If by Christian philosophy we meant a body of purported knowledge among whose items would be proofs of the soul's immortality and of God's existence which could be cogent only for Christians, by appeal to their faith, then the concept of Christian philosophy is ambiguous at best and ridiculous at worst. Such arguments would not be philosophical in the sense the term had for the most eminent Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas. No. we must say that if a Christian devises arguments for God's existence or the immortality of the soul, those arguments are philosophical precisely insofar as they are cogent for any man who inspects the evidence provided; there can be no intrinsic dependence on faith in a philosophical argument.
When one consults the literature on Christian philosophy, he finds that no one understands the phrase in the sense of it we have just dismissed as ambiguous and/or ridiculous.{24} Perhaps the note most commonly struck in that literature could be put as follows. Being a Christian gives one a disposition which is not without its effect on the philosophical arguments he devises. That is, Christian philosophy is generally regarded as a matter of Christian philosophizing. This can mean many different things. Two mathematicians are at work at separate blackboards, chalking furiously away. A third mathematician enters, scans the boards, and passes a mathematical judgment on the results of their efforts. One of the two working mathematicians is a Christian and, prior to going to work, he has commended his efforts to God, offered up what he is about to do for the glory of God. The other working mathematician is simply areligious; God and all that sort of thing simply do not engage his attention. When he set to work he resolved to do his damnedest to come up with something that would knock the third mathematician -- the chairman of the department, as it happens -- off his gouty feet. The point is that the motive of the Christian mathematician is decidedly different, but we do not expect him to get extra credit in mathematics for it. Nonetheless, when we recall our earlier discussions of morality and the intellectual life, we could come up with some kind of argument to the effect that the Christian attitude may, in one possessing the requisite talent, provide motives which would have salutary effects within mathematics. If he is a good Christian and not motivated by pride or vanity, he is thereby free of possible impediments for doing mathematics well. But of course one need not be a Christian to be free of those impediments. Since we have reached this far for a favorable concomitant of belief, we must also mention that the Christian attitude could favor sloppy mathematics. The Christian might think a passion for correctness or creativity were inimical to his ultimate destiny and perform accordingly. Perhaps we would want to dismiss this second example as a misunderstanding, but if we appeal to the concrete we must allow for the effects of faith as it is found in the believers who are.
There is really little point in pursuing such considerations. They are inevitably forced and, more crucially, they connect only minimally with the questions discussed when the matter of Christian philosophy comes up.This is not to say that the move from philosophy to philosophizing is not appropriate here, but that we do not yet have in hand the information that makes the move important and interesting.
Let us go back to what we said earlier about revelation and faith. In speaking of these, we gave the impression that the sum total of what has been revealed must be believed in the strong sense precisely because it is beyond man's ken in this life. This must now be qualified. As it happens, a goodly amount has been revealed which men can in principle know apart from revelation. This is the area of what Aquinas called the praeambula fidei, preambles of faith. For example to accept revelation is to accept the existence of God but it is also to accept as true that men can apart from revelation know that God exists.{25} To accept revelation is to accept that man's destiny transcends the fact of death, that his goal is eternal happiness with God. Many Christians, nevertheless, feel, with some other philosophers, that by natural reason alone we can arrive at knowledge of the immortality of the soul. One of the more striking aspects of revelation is that it contains what came to be called natural law precepts. Now a natural law precept is a moral norm that one cannot fail to see by reflecting on the human situation, on the kind of agent man is. Why would God in revelation speak to man of things man knows, or could come to know, apart from revelation?{26}
From a Christian point of view, this oddity is rather easily explained. It is one thing to speak of philosophy and the intrinsic demands and character of philosophy; it is quite another matter when we consider the men who engage in philosophizing. For the Christian, man is in a fallen condition, he bears on his soul the marks of the fall of the race in Adam. The net effect of this is that man, however clear we may be as to his destiny naturally considered, that is, apart from grace and faith, is in a condition where it is highly unlikely that he will perform even his natural activities well. As a result of sin, original and personal, man's mind is darkened, his nature disordered, his appetites at war with reason. In the moral order he often fails to recognize even common norms of behavior, norms which are anchored precisely in the kind of agent he is. His culture reflects his behavior and the young are raised in ways which can systematically prevent them from seeing the way things are. In a nutshell, to the Christian, it becomes painfully obvious that man needs grace, needs the supernatural, in order to do correctly or well what he is naturally inclined to do. That is, in order to be a good man one must have the aid of grace. Notice that what is being said is not simply that grace is necessary to man if he is to achieve his supernatural goal; it is is necessary for him if he is to achieve his natural goal. "Necessary" varies in meaning in those two claims; grace is absolutely necessary in the first instance, more likely than not, by and large, necessary in the second.
The effect of such considerations, which, as stated, commend themselves only to the believer, on philosophy is remarkable. If natural reasoning must begin with evident truths and if, for one reason or another, a man can fail to accept even the evident, the Christian whose faith englobes those truths has an extra-philosophical ground for being disposed to see them. His faith provides him with guideposts for his thinking, navigational stars that are fixed both in the evidence of things and in his faith. Furthermore, if he believes that God exists, if he believes the soul is immortal, if he believes there are naturally knowable norms for human action, he is disposed to ground these in evidence other than revelation. Notice that his faith does not provide him with philosophical arguments; it does provide him with convictions and certitudes about things that can be known and his conviction and certitude are antecedent to his knowledge, if he goes on to acquire it. Of course the non-believer would be incensed by such talk and I am under no illusion that what I am saying could be cogent for him. What I am trying to describe is the attitude of the Christian as he engages in philosophy. The non-believer can be rightly without interest in that antecedent certitude; he will and should demand from the Christian philosopher arguments which are independent of his extra-philosophical certitudes. Nevertheless, for the Christian philosopher, the conviction and certitude he has from his faith are a tremendous boon when he philosophizes. He may search twenty years and more for a cogent proof of God's existence and know he has not found it. Yet, while he will continue to strive to find that proof, while he retains all kinds of extra-philosophical motives for continuing the search, he does not doubt that God exists. His doubt doesn't bear on his attempted proofs; he knows the ones he has so far come up with are no good. But he knows, thanks to his faith, that God exists. Would he, if he proved, really proved, God's existence, continue to believe? Yes, he would, because God as he can be known and God as he is believed in by the Christian are one God seen under different aspects. It is sometimes said that a proved God is no God. By that is meant, I suspect, that no philosophical proof could ever ground the total commitment that is the Christian life, and that is true. But Christians must believe that God can be known by non-Christians, by pagans. When St. Paul spoke of the Romans, he was not saying that they had rejected faith; he was saying that they knew God exists and failed to live accordingly and thereby fell into the vices he goes on to record. The God some pagans knew and the God Christians believe is the same God; the God whose existence I might prove and the God whom I believe and would continue to believe are the same God. But what I can know of God and what I believe of God are different and will remain different. That is why the oft-repeated remark that the God of Aristotle and the God of revelation are different does not have the import it is thought to have. The remark, in context, suggests that there is something incompatible between what philosophers say of God and what Christians believe of God; this may be true, but it is not necessarily true, true by the nature of the case. What is true by the nature of the case is that philosophers will never know about God what can only be believed of him, but of course that recognition does not lead us to chide the philosopher.
The phrase Christian philosophy can be made to deliver up this sense. Thanks to their faith, Christians are in possession of certitude about a number of crucial truths which can be known apart from faith; their antecedent certitude sustains their quest even though it does not as such provide them with the arguments on which natural knowledge of the truths in question may depend. Because faith embraces two regions, what can be known as well as what cannot be known but only believed, he cannot accept the possibility that something would be conclusively true for reason which is in conflict with what he believes. He knows, with the certitude of faith, that no one could conclusively show that it is impossible that God exists. This conviction does not provide him with a philosophical refutation, of course, but it prods him to find one. Quite apart from its influence in areas of conflict between reason and faith, the Christian attitude is a powerful motive for seeking knowledge. If knowledge is a perfection of our nature, if grace builds on nature, then the fullness of being to which he is called will include as much knowledge as he can acquire. Rather than being an invitation to obscurantism, faith should be a felt obligation to intellectual inquiry.
The ringing rhetoric of those final claims may sound as leaden echo in the secular mind. How can one who admits that for the Christian there are extra-philosophical guide-posts to reasoning, antecedent certitudes that await sustaining arguments, possibly speak of free inquiry and withstand the charge of obscurantism? It would be possible to reply to this by saying that no one really is prepared to follow an argument to whatever term. For example, if someone undertakes to prove to the physicist that the physical world is not really there to be studied, few physicists will be apt to listen with an open mind. They have prejudged the issue. They have not the least doubt in the reality of the external world. If they listen, they look for flaws, for leaps, for ambiguities and, when they find them, they sense with joy that their antecedent conviction is being indirectly confirmed. There is a sense of free inquiry such that free inquiry is not even an abstract possibility for men -- where free means unencumbered by any certitudes prior to a given argument. There is no argument which does not assume something and assume it as certain; that is, take it to be certain as opposed to seeing what it would be like if. Of course faith may be an impediment to knowledge; throughout the history of Christianity there has been a running battle between the dialecticians and the anti-dialecticians. But faith need not be an impediment, it does not prevent one from being a philosopher; it can and should be a stimulus to do philosophy.
Since in the course of this chapter we gave an interim summary of the argument, we can be brief here. Beginning with a disgruntled Catholic who wondered about the intellectual respectability of a philosophy curriculum influenced by the wishes of the Church, we sought to allay his fears by pointing out that any beginning student of philosophy is placed in a position where he has to trust the framers of a curriculum. Talk about a trust or belief antecedent to knowledge led us into a discussion of the influence of the extra-philosophical on philosophical knowing, and we introduced the distinction between philosophy and philosophizing and, in terms of the latter, sought to show why once upon a time the influence of moral dispositions on thinking was a problem directly faced. That we still retain an inclination to recognize the importance of moral attitudes in the intellectual life was shown in a number of ways. The hope was that, with all this as background, a discussion of the influence of religious faith on philosophy could be undertaken in such a way that it would not appear a wholly unusual state of affairs. The problem of Christian philosophy was addressed in terms of the Christian philosopher, the philosophizing the Christian engages in and we hoped to show that this involves nothing inimical to philosophy as such but rather a possibly beneficial influence on philosophy. At the least we hoped to show that the believer can be a philosopher. If this has been established, we are prepared to undertake a discussion of the specific advice the Church has given the Catholic concerning the study of philosophy, namely, Ite ad Thomam: Go to Thomas.
{1} For Aquinas on faith, see Summa theologiae, IIaIIae, qq. 1-7, Q.D. de veritate,, q. 14.
{2} Josef Pieper, Belief and Faith, A Philosophical Tract, New York, 1963.
{3} For Aristotle on the influence of the familiar on inquiry, see Metaphysics, II, 3.
{4} "It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference." Nicomachean Ethics, II, I.
{5} See Aquinas, Q.D. de veritate, q. 2, a. 2.
{6} For this conception of the nature of logic, see my The Logic of Analogy, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1961.
{7} See J. Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, Mentor-Omega Edition, New York, 1963, pp. 69 ff.
{8} See "Kierkegaard and Speculative Thought" in The New Scholasticism, January, 1966.
{9} What I am getting at here may be tied up with Husserl's notion of the lebenswelt. See James Collins, "Husserl and the Bond of Natural Being," in Three Paths of Philosophy, pp. 348 ff.
{10} "The real subject is not the cognitive subject, since in knowing he moves in the sphere of the possible; the real subject is the ethically existing subject." Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. Swenson and Lowrie, Princeton, 1944. p. 281.
{11} See Charles DeKoninck's introduction in S. Cantin, Précis de psychologie thomiste, Quebec, 1948, pp. vii-lxxxiii and DeKoninck's The Hollow Universe, New York, 1961.
{12} Nicomachean Ethics, I, 7.
{13} Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, Dover Edition, New York, 1954.
{14} "But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when all such inventions were already established, the sciences which do not aim at giving pleasure or at the necessities of life were discovered, and first in the places were men first began to have leisure." Metaphysics, I, I. In the next chapter, Aristotle puts the point in a single sentence. "All the sciences, indeed, are more necessary than this, but none is better."
{15} An important exception is Max Scheler. See his On the Eternal in Man, London, 1960.
{16} IIaIIae, q. 49, a. 3. ad 1m.
{17} Ibid., q. 53, a. 3.
{18} IIaIIae, q. 166, a. 2.
{19} On all this, see T. MacLellan, "the Moral Virtues and the Speculative Life," Laval théologique et philosophique, XII, 2 (1956), pp. 175-232.
{20} See note 1 above and Pieper's Belief and Faith.
{21} See the Postscript, p. 189.
{22} Q.D. de veritate, q. 14, a. 1, ad 5m.
{23} Maritain has always insisted on the continuity of the intellectual and spiritual lives, an insistence built into the title of his masterpiece, Les degres du savoir.
{24} The following books are among those I have in mind when I speak of the literature on Christian philosophy. E. Gilson, Christianity and Philosophy, New York, 1939; J. V. Langmead-Casserly, The Christian in Philosophy, London, 1949; Luigi Bogliolo, Il Problema della Filosofia Cristiana, Brescia, 1959; Fidel G. Martinez, De l'authenticité d'une philosophie à l'intérieur de la pensée chrétienne, Oña, n.d.; R. Jolivet, La philosophie chrétienne et la pensée contemporaine, Paris, 1932; M. Nedoncelle, Existe-t-il une philosophie chrétienne? Paris, 1956; A. C. Pegis, Christian Philosophy and Intellectual Freedom, Milwaukee, 1955; A. Naud, Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne, Montreal, 1960.
{25} For the notion of preambles of faith, see Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 1, a. 2, ad 1m. That God's existence can be known apart from faith was taught by Vatican I as the clear sense of Romans, I, 20.
{26} See Josef Fuchs, Natural Law, New York, 1965.