Fr. John Joe Lakers, my close
friend who died in 2011, got his philosophical education at Oxford in England.
That education was sometimes called “analytic” philosophy, and focused on
language. As “JJ’ went though the last decades of the 1900s, he began to relate
this approach to what was coming to be called “postmodernism.”
I come at postmodernism through
sociology, and specifically, sociological theory. I taught a course with that
title for several years. The readings that were appearing in the theory textbooks
were by strange new authors: Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and
Richard Rorty. When JJ talked about postmodernism, he related it also to Rene
Descartes, Emmanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche especially was toxic for
believers. He was famous for his statement that “God is dead.”
But our Franciscan approach to
philosophy was grounded in the principle that no one is so toxic that we cannot
dialogue with that person, and that sometimes ideas that appear toxic at first
have some merit to them. The education that we received in Our Lady of Angels
Seminary in Cleveland in the 1950s was heavily influenced by two Franciscan
friars, Philotheus Boehner and Allan Wolter. Boehner, a German emigre who was
widely known in European Catholic philosophical circles, had become a
specialist in William of Ockham, another toxic author. Ockham got into trouble
with Pope John XXII, and Thomistic authors accused him of being a precursor to
the Reformation. Wolter was a specialist in the writings of John Duns Scotus,
but was sufficiently competent in scientific cosmology that he was able to
teach alternate semesters at Princeton.
The Franciscan philosophical
tradition, therefore, never accepted Pope Leo XIII’s 1897 decree that all
Catholic philosophy and theology should be based on the writings of Thomas
Aquinas. In JJ’s view, that position froze Catholic thinking into the
thirteenth century and made it impossible for Catholic scholars to deal
honestly with anything more recent.
Back to postmodernism. JJ was
determined to mine the thinking of Nietzsche and the postmodernists for nuggets
of insight that might contribute to a life of faith in our world.
My reading in the aforementioned
postmodernist authors convinced me that their position could be boiled down to
one statement. (I have always held that anything can be boiled down to one
statement.) That statement is: “Any time someone claims to be speaking the
truth, that person is hiding an agenda of getting power over someone else.”
Postmodernists are rejected by many
Catholic authors because their position can be rephrased as “There is no such
thing as the truth.” That formulation is completely nihilistic, and can easily
be rejected, even on philosophical grounds. It reminds me of the riddle that we
discussed in philosophy: “All statements are false, including this one.” To
claim that there is no such thing as the truth is to imply that the statement
itself is true.
Back to Sociology
In the 1960s, a sociologist, Peter
Berger, and a Lutheran theologian, Thomas Luckmann, wrote a small book with the
title The Social Construction of Reality. The title says it all. What we
call “reality” is a socially constructed thing, and as such is subject to the
vagaries of the social groups that are constructing it.
Behind that definition of reality
is an idea as old as sociology—W.I. Thomas’s 1917 principle of what we called “the
definition of the situation”: “If a situation is defined as real, it is real in
its consequences.”
Sociologists have accepted that
principle over most of the last century and society has continued to exist.
What we have is a tension between the fact that we humans tell stories about
things that happen to us, and the fact that sometimes the stories we tell are
not verified by others.
The best example of this is a court
of law. Every trial is a competition between competing definitions of the
situation—competing stories. The defendant claims that something happened, and
tells the story in support of that claim. The prosecutor challenges the story
with an alternate story about what happened. The jury’s role is to determine
which the of the two stories is more likely to describe what actually happened.
Sometimes no one can determine what
actually happened. The position of the postmodernists is that such a situation
is in effect in most of the important issues in life. I think they argue that
position because they see people using truth claims to support political
domination. But they don’t, JJ claims, get past that. All they offer is what JJ
calls “a hollow voice of protest.”
Thomas Aquinas and his more modern
followers, including popes, talk about “natural law.” The term really means
that there are some stories about reality that everyone accepts, and that if
you don’t accept the story, you are mentally or morally deficient. That is a
shaky basis for making decisions about life. For centuries people accepted the
story that the sun goes around the earth. The Church has clung to stories about
human sexuality that most of the rest of society has rejected--for example,
that artificial means of contraception are bad. The only sense I can make out
of that statement is that it means that bad things happen when you use
artificial means of contraception. But whether bad things happen or not is a
matter for observation. The last fifty years of observation give evidence that,
while there are some bad outcomes of such use, as is true of almost anything in
life, overall such use does not cause enough harm to forbid the practice.
What does all this mean?
The endpoint of this line of
reasoning is that the Catholic intellectual community, especially those who
claim to speak authoritatively in the name of the Church, is out of touch with
the major philosophical currents of the day. That is one of the roots of the
widespread abandonment of religious affiliation. There are other sources of
such abandonment, most notably the huge tendency toward individualistic
isolation in our societies, but when we have no credible answer to the
questions that people put to us, we lose them.
This gap between official Church
teaching and the wider philosophical environment is one of the sources of lack
of applicants for leadership in the Church—i.e. priesthood. Who wants to be
locked into presenting things as true when the individual is not convinced they
are true. Even worse, who wants to be locked into a situation where you cannot
even discuss the issues?
The clergy problem is not limited
to the Catholic community. Protestant groups also face a slowdown in clergy
recruitment. I suggest that those groups face a similar problem. Their
spiritualities—the practices and stories that they use to structure the lives
of believers—are too often out of touch with the realities that most people
have constructed for themselves. Protestant congregations have their own
versions of orthodoxy, and their own punishments for people who say things
outside the orthodoxy.
In short, part of our problem is intellectual,
and its solution has to be to grapple on a wider level with the intellectual
issues. That was JJ’s position, and it is mine.
