My fellow friar, Fr. Jim Wheeler,
has put a sign in our yard promoting “Catholic Radio.”
When I listen to the local Catholic
radio station occasionally, I notice that it is sponsored by EWTN, Mother
Angelica’s organization. Some of the speakers I have heard have an attitude
that I would describe as “triumphalist apologetics.” They speak as people who
know the answers, and are proud that they do not have to take a back seat to
anybody intellectually. They have Thomas Aquinas.
This is unfortunate. Their attitude
is not conducive to a real dialogue with people who might not agree with them.
Their attitude can be improved, but
their use of Thomas Aquinas bothers me.
Part of the reason that Thomas
bothers me is that he was a member of the Dominican Order, and I am a member of
the Franciscan Order, and the two Orders have traditionally been rivals
intellectually. Sixty years ago, when I was studying philosophy in our
Cleveland seminary, my instructors based three years of course work on the
Franciscans John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. In our last semester we took
one course in Thomistic thought. True, Pope Leo XIII said, back in 1897, that
Thomas should be the basis of all Catholic thought. My Franciscan forebears,
operating out of centuries of Scotus, couldn’t do that. Pope Leo’s
infallibility did not extend that far.
But Thomas bothers me also because
he and Scotus and Ockham are all thinkers from the middle ages, and there are
centuries of philosophical development between them and us. After I was
ordained I was told to get a degree in sociology, which I did, and I taught
that subject for 35 years. But I was a close friend of a friar-philosopher here
in Quincy, Fr. John Joe Lakers, who wrote a lot of material about the drawbacks
of medieval models in our time.
“JJ” studied at Oxford, and got a
background in the philosophy of language. In later years he got interested in “postmodernism.”
I have seen the term “postmodern”
used in Catholic publications as a stick to beat other thinkers over the head
with. It’s as though you just have to use the word “postmodern” and you think “stupid,”
if not downright evil.
The postmodernists are accused of
saying things like “there is no such thing as truth.” Some of them probably did
say that, because people who call themselves postmodern sometimes liked to
startle their readers into original thinking. But what the postmodernists were
really saying was “any time someone claims to be speaking the truth, look out,
because they are hiding a desire to control someone else.” That is not the same
thing as saying there is no truth.
Postmodern thought has connections
with sociological theory. One of the oldest principles in sociology is the
statement by W.I. Thomas, which he wrote around 1918, “If people define a
situation as real, it is real in its consequences.” If you think someone is
coming at you with a knife to kill you, you are likely to defend yourself, even
if the person is not in fact coming at you to kill you. This means also that
two people can look at the same thing and define it differently.
Courts of law operate on this
principle all the time. The prosecutor and the defendant tell different stories
about an event. They may each really think their story expresses what happened.
The purpose of the court is to apply the rules of evidence to the two stories
and try to determine which story is closer to what really happened--to the
truth.
In 1966 Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmann published a book titled The Social Construction of Reality. The
title tells it all. “Reality” is a story shared by a group of people.
The medieval scholastic thinkers,
and Plato and Aristotle before them, thought that they could formulate a story
about any event that everyone everywhere would have to accept as true. They
claimed to speak from a godlike perspective, one that would see and describe
reality in terms that would be true for all time and in all places. They wrote
in Latin, so their stories were shaped by the Latin language. Today we know
that every language causes its speakers to see events in slightly different
ways.
Aquinas and Scotus, following
Plato, thought that behind the “reality” that we observe is a real reality, the
world of ideas. The things we humans experience are shadows of those real
realities. Those realities never change. Because they never change, we can deduce
not only our understanding of the physical world and the world of plants and
animals, but also the world of human moral behavior, “natural law.” Everybody
knows that some behaviors are just wrong, in that world of ideas.
Ockham challenged that theory. He
said that there is no world of ideas out there. What we call universal ideas
are stories that we create from our experiences. We observe first, and then we
generalize.
Ockham’s challenge seems to throw
everything up for grabs. It makes our most cherished beliefs the result of
groups of people telling the same stories about things. What happens if those
people tell different stories?
Things are not totally up for
grabs. We have two institutions that keep our story-telling under
control--never under complete control, but control enough for us to get through
life without killing each others. The two institutions are the courts, which I
mentioned above, and science. Science attempts to evaluate any story we tell by
using observation.
I keep using the term “story.” That
term is central to the way we humans deal with reality. For example, every
scientific theory is a story, a fiction. It is a story evaluated by
observation. No scientific theory can be proved true for all time. One
incongruous observation can demolish a theory. That doesn’t mean that science
is useless or evil. We have gotten a lot of mileage out of the scientific
advances of the last two or three centuries.
Scientific work has expanded from
the physical universe to the human world, including the psychological and
sociological realities among which we live. By trying to use Thomas Aquinas as
the basis for our thinking, we shut ourselves off from the intellectual world
around us. We open ourselves to isolation and ridicule. Thomas Aquinas himself
was accused of heresy by the University of Paris because he was using a pagan
thinker, Aristotle, to describe the world in new ways.
The Church got along for a thousand
years before Thomas Aquinas. For that matter, it got along for 250 years before
the Council of Nicea formulated the Nicene Creed. The early Christians took
people’s experiences of Jesus and struggled to let those experiences shape
their lives. Those Christians told all kinds of stories about Jesus: he was
just a man, he was just God pretending to be human. Nobody had a claim on any
story. Things were messy.
They are still messy. The last
couple of hundred years have caused us to tell the stories of Jesus in ways
that were ever told before. St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus
read most of Scripture as historical truth, and they built some remarkable
thought systems on that basis. Scripture is literature, stories and other
literary forms told by human beings with their cultural backgrounds and biases.
I still believe that God’s Spirit moves among all the messiness. Conversation
requires humility and openness to changing one’s mind. If we are going to
converse with the physicists and psychologists of our day, we cannot begin with
the claim that we know the important truths about human life and nobody else
does.
