Alasdair MacIntyre in his 2009 monograph God, Philosophy, Universities gives what he calls a “selective history” of the Catholic philosophical tradition. This history of philosophy is centered on the relationship between the trinity of factors expressed in the title: God, philosophy, and universities, and culminates in a concluding chapter in which MacIntyre gives some insight regarding how Catholic philosophy ought to proceed in the twenty-first century. MacIntyre notes in particular the importance of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et ratio insofar as it provides a contemporary Catholic account of the interdependence of philosophy and theology as well as what MacIntyre calls a “redefinition” of the Catholic philosophical tradition for the modern era. Thus, MacIntyre’s book, taking into account both the title and subtitle, could perhaps be described as a history of Catholic philosophy that is meant to set the stage for his critique of the contemporary university and to provide some suggestions for a much-needed response to the rise of secularism from contemporary Catholic philosophers.
To do so, MacIntyre offers an elaborate albeit selective history of what he calls “the Catholic philosophical tradition.” He begins with discussions of its precursors among such late antique and early medieval thinkers as Plotinus, Porphyry, St. Boethius, and St. Augustine, Maimonides, and the Muslim interpreters of Augustine. MacIntyre then discusses in the main corpus of the book the history of Catholic philosophy, including its genesis in the golden age of scholasticism in the High Middle Ages, its challenge by early modern thinkers beginning with the problems of the philosophy of René Descartes, its subsequent “absence” from philosophical dialogue from circa 1700 to 1850, and its reemergence in various branches in the works of contemporary Catholic philosophers such as Newman, Anscombe, Gilson, Maritain, St. Edith Stein, Leo XIII, and John Paul II. MacIntyre and Pope John Paul II in Fides et ratio offer several insights on the vocation of Catholic philosophy as well as an historical account of its substantive unity.
What is the Catholic Philosophical Tradition?
For MacIntyre, the Catholic philosophical tradition is a method of philosophical enquiry that is concerned with the interrelation of three core elements: God, philosophy, and universities. MacIntyre comments regarding the central, irreplaceable role of God in Catholic philosophy that: “…Finite beings who possess the power of understanding, if they know that God exists, know that he is the most adequate object of their love, and that the deepest desire of every such being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God.”[1] In a somewhat surprising move, MacIntyre then proceeds to concede three problems intrinsic to theistic philosophy that he claims can never be resolved fully by means of rational enquiry. First, there is the classic problem of evil; that is to say, the apparent contradiction between God’s innate omnipotence and goodness vis-à-vis the abundance of suffering and evil in the world. Second, MacIntyte concedes the problem of free will vs. determinism, which is defined by the apparent contradiction between God’s omniscience and the power of finite beings to act as proximate causes.[2]
Last, MacIntyre notes that theistic philosophers face a fundamental problem insofar as they must concede that if God is indeed omnipotent and eternal, then no earthly language, even philosophical language, could ever adequately describe His nature. Thus, one cannot have quidditative knowledge of God in this world. MacIntyre notes that: “All three problems… are internal to theism, not just problems posed from some external standpoint by some critic dismissive of theism. Those problems would still arise for theists even if no one had ever been an atheist, thereby showing that theism is philosophically problematic.”[3] MacIntyre concedes these points, of course, not to discredit theistic philosophy, for he makes it quite clear that the problems inherent to philosophical systems that deny the existence of God, such as skepticism, are irreconcilable in a much more detrimental way. Rather, he concedes these problems as inherent to the study of philosophy because he argues throughout the book that philosophical enquiry leads to the truths of revealed theology, and that the fact that problems arise when finite beings attempt to understand aspects of the infinite God by rational enquiry is to be expected.[4]
The other constituents of the Catholic philosophical tradition for MacIntyre are a certain set of presuppositions about “philosophy” itself as well as an understanding of the university as a place where all the particular sciences are united and interrelated with respect to theology, the study of God qua the “whole”. MacIntyre notes immediately in his introductory chapter on “philosophy” that at first, philosophy and theology seem to be incompatible, because theology, which begins with divine revelation and proceeds by means of faith, insists that the God of the three great monotheisms, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, requires our total unquestioning obedience. On the other hand, philosophy begins with the human mind’s desire to know and proceeds by means of rational activity, which demands that all assertion are subject to questioning and philosophical analysis.[5] MacIntyre outlines three possible responses to this apparent incompatibility of Faith and Reason: an absolute rejection of theism as unreasonable, an absolute rejection of philosophy as impious, or a rejection of the claim of incompatibility itself. The Catholic philosophical tradition adopts the third response and argues for not only the compatibility but the codependence of philosophy and theology and of Faith and Reason as correlative means of inquiry. Commenting on Catholic philosophers’ approach to this important debate, MacIntyre writes: “…Is this complex set of attitude possible? It is so only if faith in God, that is, trust in his word, can include faith that, even when one is putting God to the question, one can be praising him by doing so and can expect to be sustained by him in that faith.”[6] Thus, the Catholic philosopher ought not to fear delving into problems that concern both philosophy and theology such as proofs of God’s existence, the nature of angels, or attempts to understand Creation, but he submits God to scrutiny with the ultimate intention of bringing Him praise and glory by doing so.
Pope John Paul II offers profound insight to the question “What is the Catholic philosophical tradition?” in his 1998 encyclical Fides et ratio as well. This encyclical is recommended enthusiastically by MacIntyre as a crucial account of the genesis and unity of Catholic philosophy as well as a “battle plan” for how it should respond to the challenges of secularism in contemporary society.[7] In particular, the pontiff goes into greater detail than MacIntyre in his account of the roots of philosophical inquiry in Christian Scripture, Tradition, and the nature of the human person itself, which eventually led to the formation of a distinctly Catholic philosophical tradition. The pontiff makes it very clear that in his view the unity of Catholic philosophy is utterly dependent on the necessary interrelation of Faith and Reason in his poignant opening line: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart, a desire to know the truth- in a word, to know himself- so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”[8] John Paul II makes the crucial point that philosophical inquiry has emerged in some form or another in every culture in every age albeit in many different, often conflicting, systems of inquiry. The pope cites various pre-Christian thinkers in both Western and Eastern antiquity, including Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Aristotle, Homer, Siddhartha Gautama, and Plato, and authors of the Hebrew Scriptures as thinkers who has various insights to offer on what John Paul calls the “fundamental questions which pervade human life”, such as “Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life? Thus, in a somewhat similar manner to MacIntyre, John Paul states, as an introduction to the specific realm of Catholic philosopher, that the great thinkers of all the great religions and civilizations of antiquity were all composed answers to the same set of ultimate questions. Thus, John Paul makes the very important point right from the beginning that he as the leader of one of the world’s great religions thinks recognizes that rational activity is part of, not opposed to, human nature. It is not necessarily antithetical to piety or divine revelation.[9]
John Paul’s account of the nature of Catholic philosophy differs from that of MacIntyre in the sense that Pope John Paul II offers a lengthy analysis of how rational enquiry has always been viewed as an intrinsic part of the Catholic tradition, even in its antecedents in the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures. For John Paul, the three constituents of Catholic philosophy are knowledge of self, God, and the world, and he argues that in the Catholic philosophical tradition, “…Reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way. There is thus no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith: each contains the other, and each has its own scope for action.”[10] John Paul II comments on the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures, such as the Books of Sirach, Proverbs, and Tobit, that it is remarkable that they carry not only faith tradition of Israel but also “the treasury of cultures and civilizations which have long since vanished.”[11] John Paul notes that even before the birth of Christ, our Jewish forefathers had an intimate understanding of the relationship between knowledge gained in Faith and knowledge learned through rational enquiry. Scripture lauds the wise man as a seeker of truth, the one truth seen through the two lenses of Faith and Reason; the pontiff quotes from Sirach: “Happy the man who meditates on wisdom and reasons intelligently, who reflects in his heart on her ways and ponders her secrets… He places his children under her protection and lodges under her boughs; by her he is sheltered from the heat and he dwells in the shade of her glory.”[12] The ancient Jews even had some insight into the necessity of Faith and Reason as correlative principles as evidenced in the passage: “The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps.”[13] Thus, whereas MacIntyre later argues that the Catholic philosophical tradition did not begin until the High Middle Ages, John Paul II sees its roots in Christian antiquity and even in the pre-Christian Wisdom literature of Egypt and Israel.
The Origins of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition
The pontiff sees an continuous recognition of the importance of Reason as a means of better understanding the mysteries of the Faith in the New Testament and early Christian writings as well. The most direct interaction between Greek philosophy and the Christian faith is found in Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 17, in which St. Paul undergoes a missionary journey to Greece in attempt to convert the pagans there to Christianity. St. Paul must have been shocked and somewhat appalled by the plethora of pagan idols in the city, John Paul comments, but his approach to evangelization in the “city of philosophers” was quite clever and an important model for the subsequent Catholic philosophical tradition. He said to the Greeks: “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way, for as I went through this city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”[14] Instead of adopting an entirely antithetical stance to the philosophical tradition that the Greeks treasured so much, then, the wise St. Paul rather chose to search for common ground between their philosophy and the Christian Faith he came to preach. He did so by lauding them for being “extremely religious in every way,” and used this as a starting point to preach to them about the One God who is Creator and Sustainer of the whole world. St. Paul was able to find this common ground by recognizing a certain transcendental nature of philosophy, albeit pagan Greek philosophy. John Paul comments on this recognition of its transcendental character: “The Apostle accentuates a truth which the Church has always treasured: in the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God.”[15] The pontiff concludes his chapter on Scriptural recognition of the dual role of Faith and Reason by noting that no one, neither philosopher nor ordinary person, can escape asking the ultimate questions with which philosophy is concerned. This universal, innate wonder shared by all mankind is what Aristotle called our “desire to know,” and the Catholic philosophical tradition recognizes that ultimately this desire to know can only be fulfilled by God, the ultimate end of Man.[16]
MacIntyre leaves Scripture out of his account entirely and views all antiquity, even Christian antiquity, as but a precursor to the genesis of the Catholic philosophical tradition. He insists that the Catholic philosophical tradition proper did not begin until the High Middle Ages, in which philosophy was recognized as a legitimate mode of enquiry in its own right for the first time in Christian history. One reason he cites for this somewhat unusual claim is that in the Middle Ages, there was a unique recognition among Catholic philosophers that each of the liberal arts had something distinct to offer to an “integrated body of secular knowledge,” and that theology had a unique role as the “Queen of the sciences” in connecting the various particular sciences to the focal point of all knowledge: God.[17] For MacIntyre, the emergence of great Catholic universities in the High Middle Ages as places where the Church did its thinking is the most important defining feature of a truly Catholic philosophical tradition. He states: “It was because thirteenth-century European universities…became scenes of intellectual conflict, places where the fundamental issues that divided and defined the age were articulated, that their history provides the setting for the emergence of the Catholic philosophical tradition.”[18] Thus, with this university-centered definition of the Catholic philosophical tradition, great thinkers of Christian antiquity and the early medieval period such as St. Augustine, St. Boethius, and St. Anselm are not considered to be genuine partakers in the Catholic philosophical tradition.
MacIntyre admits that the theology of St. Augustine dominated throughout the Middle Ages, as did his provisions for the interpretation of Scripture, but he argues that the philosophy of St. Augustine was distinct from the Catholic philosophical tradition insofar as it viewed philosophical enquiry as a means to the end of understanding tenets of the Christian faith rather than a legitimate means of enquiry in its own right. In other words, philosophy is the “handmaiden” of theology rather than its complement. MacIntyre argues that Augustinian thinkers were at times even opposed to the integration of philosophy and theology that became the crowning achievement of the scholastic project. He states regarding this antipathy: “The question of the relationship of philosophy to theology became the question of the relationship of Aristotle’s philosophy- and science- to theology. Many Augustinian theologians found… reason to reject…the Aristotelian claim that philosophical enquiry has its own standards and methods, independent of those of theology.”[19] On the other extreme, MacIntyre makes the important point that the Averroistic Aristotelians at the Sorbonne proposed a radical theory called the “doctrine of two truths.” This mottled attempt to explain the relationship of philosophical truth to theological truth taught that the truths of Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic Christianity are, as they seem to be due to the aforementioned problems intrinsic to theistic philosophy, contradictory. However, one can still be a devout Catholic and a follower of Aristotelian philosophy without contradiction by conceding to two separate sets of truths- those of philosophy and those of theology. For instance, as an Aristotelian one accepts the eternity of the world as philosophical knowledge, but as a Catholic, one believes in the Creation doctrine as theological truth.[20] This blatant violation of the principle of contradiction did not, of course, solve the problem of the relationship between philosophical and theological truth. It did, however, illustrate the great need for a comprehensive philosophical system compatible with Catholicism that could account of the principles of philosophy as means of inquiry in itself, and this project was undertaken by St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Response of St. Thomas Aquinas
Pope John Paul II does not agree with MacIntyre, of course, that the Catholic philosophical tradition does not emerge until the thirteenth century. He sees it as one continuous development through the centuries of understanding of the relationship between Faith and Reason and sees Catholic philosophy present already even in the times of the apostles. He does, however, agree with MacIntyre regarding the pivotal role that St. Thomas Aquinas played in Catholic philosophical tradition insofar as he proposed a philosophical system that accounted for philosophy as a means of enquiry independent of theology. The pontiff devotes an entire section to the Angelic Doctor in Fides et ratio entitled “The enduring originality of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas,” and comments: “In an age when Christian thinkers were rediscovering the treasures of ancient philosophy…Thomas had the great merit of giving pride of place to the harmony which exists between faith and reason. Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God, he argued; hence there can be no contradiction between them.”[21] St. Thomas rejected those who distrusted philosophy as intrinsically opposed to the Christian faith just because it came from primarily pagan sources.
Rather, St. Thomas argued that all truths come from God, and believed that the truths of Aristotelian philosophy, if properly expounded in the light of Christian Revelation, could be of great help in providing rational justification for some of truths of Christianity. Pope John Paul II credits St. Thomas for coming to the recognition that: “Faith therefore has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfillment, so faith builds upon and perfects reason. Illumined by faith, reason…finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God.”[22] Last, John Paul also credits St. Thomas for being an “apostle of truth.” One of St. Thomas’ greatest contributions to Catholic philosophy, John Paul II notes, was his recognition that regardless of its source, every truth is a gift of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. Thus, St. Thomas, unlike the Averroists, was able to provide a justification for philosophical enquiry that respected the magisterium of the Church and would become a model for a Catholic understanding of philosophy and theology as two paths to the same truth of the One God.
The Absence of Catholic Philosophy in the Early Modern Era
Both Pope John Paul II and MacIntyre acknowledge the regrettable absence of Catholic philosophy in the early modern era following the golden age of scholasticism in the High Middle Ages. Indeed, MacIntyre notes that many of the problems faced by contemporary Catholic philosophers are the result of one hundred and fifty years of relative silence (c. 1700-1850) from Catholic philosophers; he states: “To have to reckon with all of these [secular challenges] now is part of the price that Catholic thought has had to pay for its absence from the philosophical scene during those periods in which these secularizing modes of thought were first developed.”[23] MacIntyre, then, attributes a significant portion of the “blame” for some of the grievous errors made by early modern philosophers to Catholic philosophers who never entered the realm of the debate in the first place. He states regarding this period of absence: “There was in consequence no dialogue between Catholic philosophers and the seminal thinkers in the development of modern philosophy. Where philosophy flourished, Catholic faith was absent. Where the Catholic faith was sustained, philosophy failed to flourish.”[24] The Catholic philosophical tradition was still passed on in seminaries, Catholic universities, and Dominican and Franciscans houses of study, but it was an “arid restatement” of old ideas bereft of philosophical introspection.[25]
MacIntyre notes the bitter irony that René Descartes, a devout Catholic who believed that his philosophical system could prove the existence of God beyond a shadow of a doubt, played a pivotal role in the divorce of Faith and Reason following the decline of scholasticism in the Late Middle Ages. Descartes’ philosophy based on doubt endured, but his proofs of God were recognized as intrinsically flawed almost immediately after his own lifetime, and thus his successors, such as Malebranche, Leibniz, and Spinoza, were left with the monumental task of solving the mind-body problem perpetuated by Cartesian dualism. It was only a matter of time, MacIntyre notes, before Cartesianism led to skepticism in the philosophy of David Hume, who begins with Cartesian doubt and concludes that there can be neither objective knowledge nor ontological certainty at all.[26] This skepticism, of course, is totally contrary to the harmonious view of Faith and Reason promoted by St. Thomas and the other scholastic thinkers. MacIntyre notes on this growing disconnect between Faith and Reason in the modern era: “As modern philosophy moved beyond its Cartesian beginnings, its conception of the nature and limits of human knowledge and of the universe, insofar as it is knowable, leaves no place for the God of theism.”[27] Thus, MacIntyte argues that the Catholic philosophical tradition, having emerged rather recently in the thirteenth century, had already denigrated into a period of isolation by the eighteenth century.
Pope John Paul II also discusses the absence of Catholic philosophy in the early modern era in Fides et ratio, but his perspective differs from that of MacIntyre insofar as it is based on the denigration of scholastic principles rather than key figures in philosophical history. John Paul II criticizes Cartesian and post-Cartesian contributions to the separation of Faith from Reason without attributing blame to any specific philosopher when he states: “As a result of the exaggerated rationalism of certain thinkers, positions grew more radical and there emerged eventually a philosophy which was separate from and absolutely independent of the contents of faith.”[28] John Paul argues that not only did early modern philosophy develop a mistrust of Faith, but also “an even deeper mistrust” of Reason that led to agnosticism, skepticism, and, ultimately, nihilism. The pontiff makes draws a sharp distinction between scholasticism and early modern philosophy when he states: “In short, what for patristic and medieval thought was in both theory and practice a profound unity, producing knowledge capable of reaching the highest forms of speculation, was destroyed by systems which espoused the cause of rational knowledge sundered from faith and meant to take the place of faith.”[29] John Paul cites the poisonous effects of this skepticism in the particular sciences, such as the atheistic positivism that has come to dominate the physical sciences. John Paul laments in particular the nihilism that came to fruition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; he considers nihilism to be even further opposed to the Catholic philosophical tradition than skepticism because it reduces philosophy to an end in itself. The search for truth, then, becomes a hopeless search devoid of any objective meaning or truth.[30] Last, the pontiff laments how the divorce of Reason and Faith has led each to spiral into extremism: “Deprived of what Revelation offers, reason has taken side-tracks which expose it to the danger of losing sight of its final goal. Deprived of reason, faith has stressed feeling and experience, and so run the risk of no longer being a universal proposition.”[31] John Paul goes so far as to blame the excesses of unconstrained philosophy for the great human rights atrocities of the twentieth century, and concludes this section with an appeal for contemporary Catholic philosophers to recover the “profound unity” of Faith and Reason.[32]
Contemporary Catholic Philosophy: Challenges for Today and Tomorrow
The final two chapters of MacIntyre’s God, Philosophy, Universities are devoted to an analysis of the problems facing contemporary Catholic philosophy today as well as some suggestions for how Catholic philosophers ought to respond to them. One major problem is the denigration of the university, even the Catholic university, into a loosely defined collection of particular sciences that no longer have any established unifying principle. MacIntyre laments how the university, once the single defining characteristic of the Catholic philosophical tradition, has “now largely become a prologue to specialization and professionalization.”[33] There is no one whose job it is to account for the unity or even the interaction of the various disciplines, and thus there is always a temptation for particular sciences to view themselves as sufficient sources of knowledge without respect to any other discipline. Another serious problem is the relegation of philosophy to a particular discipline and the eradication of theology altogether from the pedagogies of many contemporary universities.[34] Thus, the contemporary university, much to the detriment of society, is no longer a place where students can ponder what it is to be human. MacIntyre agrees with Pope John Paul II that there is a great need for a response from Catholic philosophy to the challenge of secularism, and recommends Fides et ratio as the defining text of the mission of the Catholic philosopher in contemporary society.[35] He notes that in one sense, contemporary Catholic philosophy still allows for a wide range of philosophical disagreement, insofar as it includes such diverse philosophies as the phenomenology of St. Edith Stein, the analytic philosophy of G. E. M. Anscombe, and the neo-Thomism of Jacque Maritain and Etienne Gilson. However, these Catholic philosophers all agree on basic principles as presuppositions of philosophical enquiry, chief among them being the interdependence of Faith and Reason as correlative principles.[36]
Pope John Paul II sets forth an action plan for contemporary Catholic philosophy to reestablish an understanding of the intrinsic harmony of Faith in Reason in the final chapters of Fides et ratio. He concludes the encyclical by stating: “Philosophical enquiry can help greatly to clarify the relationship between truth and life… and above all between transcendent truth and humanly comprehensible language. This involves reciprocity between the theological disciplines ad…philosophy. Such reciprocity can prove genuinely fruitful for the communication and deeper understanding of the faith.”[37] John Paul argues that Catholic philosophers also must accept the magisterial authority, and let it guide them in their philosophical enquiry without fear that it will “restrict” their search for truth. Such an objection is not reasonable for a Catholic philosopher, the pontiff argues, because the Catholic faith has taught since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas that philosophy and theology are both autonomous disciplines with their own legitimate means of enquiry. The magisterium never proposes answers to philosophical questions of its own, but rather serves as a beacon of light to philosophers to ensure that their search remains one of truth rather than utility.[38] John Paul also recommends that Catholic philosophers recognize the unique significance of the Second Vatican Council’s emphasis on the dignity and freedom of the human person for them. Catholic philosophers have an obligation to remind the world that the desire for truth which every person has is a gift from God, not a tantalizing impetus for a hopeless journey.[39] Last, John Paul asserts: “The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.”[40] Thus, it is perfectly acceptance that there exists a multiplicity of perspectives even within the Catholic philosophical tradition, because they all agree on the fundamental presuppositions of Catholic philosophy. Catholic philosophers ought to proceed in discourse with their secular counterparts, then, so that they may convince skeptics of the fundamental principles of Catholic philosophy espoused by the Catholic philosophical tradition. Indeed, John Paul states, they have an obligation to do so, for it is not the mission of the Church to correct errant philosophy, but that of her own philosophers.[41]
Conclusion: The Unity and Vocation of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition
Alasdair MacIntyre’s monograph God, Philosophy, Universities and Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et ratio offer important contemporary Catholic perspectives on the unity and vocation of the Catholic philosophical tradition. For MacIntyre, the Catholic philosophical experience is defined by the relation of God and philosophy as studied in universities, places not only for secular education but where students learn what it is to be a human person from the perspectives of individual disciplines with respect to theology, the study of the divine. MacIntyre places such emphasis on the distinctive role of the university in Catholic philosophical tradition that he argues that Catholic philosophy did not begin until the Golden Age of scholasticism in the thirteenth century. John Paul II views the Catholic philosophical tradition as one continuous strand of recognition of Faith and Reason as correlative principles that began in Christian antiquity and even has discernible roots in Sacred Scripture. Both MacIntyre and John Paul concur that St. Thomas Aquinas played a pivotal role in the history of Catholic philosophy by developing a holistic account of philosophy and theology as unique albeit interdependent disciplines with their own valid methods of enquiry. For St. Thomas and the scholastics, all truths come from God, and therefore Catholic philosophy recognizes that philosophical truth and theological truth are two paths to the same Truth of Gods’ Revelation. MacIntyre and John Paul join together in lamenting the subsequent divorce of Faith and Reason in modern philosophy; MacIntyre criticizes the skepticism of early modern philosophy as well as the absence of a Catholic response to it whereas John Paul focuses his critique on the nihilistic philosophy of the early nineteenth century. Both men agree that Catholic philosophers have an obligation to formulate a long-overdue response to the challenge of secularism. MacIntyre and Pope John Paul II attest that the defining characteristic of the Catholic philosophical tradition is its insistence on Faith and Reason as correlative principles, and agree that contemporary society must be reminded by Catholic philosophers of this fundamental principle of the search for truth.
Resources
MacIntyre, Alasdair. God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic
Philosophical Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009.
Pope John Paul II. Fides et ratio. Encyclical letter on the relationship between Faith and Reason,
Vatican Web site. 9 December 2010. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html.
[1] Alsadair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic
Philosophical Tradition, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009) 6.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 7.
[4] Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 14.
[5] Ibid., 13-14.
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 14.
[7] Ibid., 176-8.
[8] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Encyclical letter on the relationship between Faith and Reason,
Vatican Web site. 9 December 2010, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html, Introduction.
[9] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 1.
[10] Ibid., Sec. 16-17.
[11] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 16.
[12] Sir. 14:20-27.
[13] Proverbs 16:9.
[14] Acts 17:22-23.
[15] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 24.
[16] Ibid., Sec. 27.
[17] MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 62.
[18] Ibid., 65.
[19] MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 66-67.
[20] Ibid., 67-68.
[21] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 43.
[22] Ibid.
[23] MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 66-67.
[24] Ibid., 133.
[25] Ibid.
[26] MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 132-33.
[27] Ibid., 132.
[28] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 45. It is also noteworthy that Pope John Paul II, contra MacIntyte, lumps the patristic and medieval traditions together in their recognition of the importance of Faith and Reason, albeit in variant proportions.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 46.
[31] Ibid., Sec. 48.
[32] Ibid.
[33] MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 173.
[34] Ibid., 176-77.
[35] Ibid., 165.
[36] MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 169.
[37] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 99.
[38] Ibid., Sec. 49.
[39] Ibid., Sec. 60.
[40] Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio, Sec. 49.
[41] Ibid., Sec. 50 & 51.