A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic
Liberal Education
Next | Previous |
Contents
II. CAN FAITH ILLUMINE UNDERSTANDING
The first and most pressing duty, therefore, if there is
to be Catholic education, calls for reestablishing in our
minds the central role the teaching Church should play in
the intellectual life of Catholic teachers and students. Since
the Faith liberates the believer from error in his submission
to its teachings, it both guides and strengthens his intelligence
in the performance of those activities which constitute his
very life as a thinker; and man, since he is distinguished
by rationality, lives above all through the living activity
of thinking. We should not be surprised, therefore, that we
are promised such help by Our Lord Himself when He says "I
have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly."
(John, 10, 10.)
The following examples show, by way of illustration, how
an adherence to Christian Doctrine helps the believer as he
thinks about the most serious and difficult questions: 1)
One of the most persistent questions which has occupied the
time and prompted the labors of the greatest thinkers concerns
the origin and cause of moral rectitude. It is not surprising,
therefore, that Socrates, one of the greatest and most influential
thinkers, should have given so much of his attention to it.
He examines, in the Protagoras, the common opinion
that man can, even when he knows the good, be mastered by
pleasure, and that he can as a consequence act against his
knowledge and commit an evil act. But upon examining the basis
of the opinion, he rejects it, and holds rather that all wrong
doing is the result of an ignorance of the knowledge of weights
and measures as it applies to the various pleasures and pains.
If, therefore, we were taught which are the greater pleasures
and which are the lesser, and which pains are to be endured
in the light of future pleasures, we would, according to him,
possess the sufficient requirements for moral rectitude. This
means, when we sum it up, that virtue is knowledge and that
it can be taught--a view which has become one of the most
persistent and far-reaching positions about ethics in our
civilization.
No reader, if he follows the Protagoras closely, can
escape the perplexity which Socrates' arguments arouse in
him; he will, as a consequence, begin to formulate the fundamental
questions about the moral life in the light of Socrates' discussion.
But suppose the reader is a Catholic, and that he both adheres
to his Faith and has an appropriate understanding of it; he
will believe Ezekiel and St. Paul when they teach him that
moral goodness and the good acts which follow upon it are
the result of graces which not only illumine the mind, but
which touch the heart as well. God, in speaking to Ezekiel,
tells him:
I will gather you together from the peoples, I will bring
you all back from the countries where you have been scattered,
and I will give you the land of Israel. They will come and
will purge it of all the horrors and the filthy practices.
I will give them a single heart, and I will put new spirit
in them; I will remove the heart of stone from their bodies
and give them a heart of flesh instead, so that they will
keep my laws and repeat my observances and put them into
practice. Then they shall be my people and I will be their
God.
(Ezekiel, 11, 17-21.)
And St. Paul teaches:
We would have been justified by the Law if the Law we were
given had been capable of giving life, but it is not: scripture
makes no exception when it says that sin is master everywhere.
In this way the promise can only be given through faith
in Jesus Christ and can only be given to those who have
faith.
(Galatians, 3, 21-22.)
We are taught here that in order to obey God, He Himself
must remove "the heart of stone" from our bodies
and give us a "heart of flesh." Hence God tells
Ezekiel "I will give them a single heart, and I will
put a new spirit in them; I will remove the heart of stone
from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh instead,
so that they will keep my laws. . ." St. Paul extends
this doctrine further when he teaches that the knowledge of
the Law condemns us and that it leads us to grasp our own
incapacity to fulfill it. If, therefore, we are to act rightly,
we must be given the graces which change us from desiring
evil to desiring good, and which help us to pursue our legitimate
desires.
On the one hand, therefore, we have the Socratic position
that the knowledge of the right order amongst the goods we
seek will render us impeccable, while on the other hand we
are taught by our inspired teachers that such knowledge of
itself does nothing but condemn us. Resting, therefore, in
the truth of his Faith, our reader will believe that Socrates
must be wrong, whether he himself can see the error or not.
But should he, as a serious thinker, pursue the question,
he would be aided greatly by his adherence to the truth, for
that very adherence would aid him to search for the roots
of the Socratic error. Should he so pursue the question he
could be led to distinguish the various kinds of ignorance,
and to see as a consequence that Socrates has advanced the
discussion by teaching that every sin involves ignorance,
but that he is fundamentally wrong in thinking it to be an
ignorance of the general knowledge of morals. Our reader could,
in other words, follow the procedure which led Aristotle to
both learn from Socrates and to reject the position while
saving all the truth it possesses; in this way he is aided
by the Faith to come even to those truths which reason can
discover. Christian faith, therefore, enables us to see better
the partial truth of Socrates' position from a vantage point
which saves us from adopting his errors, an achievement which,
though possible to reason, is hardly possible to any but the
greatest thinkers after arduous labor.
St. Augustine shows us the stance of the believer as he faces
these same questions. He says that grace is given "not
only that we discover what ought to be done, but also that
we do what we have discovered--not only that we believe what
ought to be loved, but also that we love what we have believed,"
and he says further:
If this grace is to be called a `teaching,' let it at any
rate be so called in such wise that God may be believed
to infuse it, along with an ineffable sweetness, more deeply
and more internally, not only by their agency who
plant and water from without, but likewise by His own too
who ministers in secret His own increase--in such way, that
He not only exhibits truth, but likewise imparts love. For
it is thus that God teaches those who have been called according
to His purpose, giving them simultaneously both to know
what they ought to do, and to do what they know.
(On the Grace of Christ, cc. 13 &
14.)
2) One of our indubitable experiences is of the recurring
opposition of our higher aspirations and our lower passions.
So much is this opposition a part of our lives, a part which
is absent from the lives of the brutes, that it has affected
the formulation of various views of human nature. Socrates
teaches, in several of the dialogues, that the individual
man is a soul, and that the body is attached to it in this
life as a punishment for the misdeeds of a previous existence.
In order to escape further punishment and gain the happiness
of which it is capable, the soul must, by living a philosophic
life, turn its attention to eternal things, so that it may
prepare itself to exist forever without the body, which existence
is its final beatitude. So plausible is this view, based as
it is upon our internal experience of the conflict within
us, that many Christians have thought that their own lives
were bifurcated into a lower or animal existence which is
concerned with this world, and a spiritual life of the soul
alone which is begun here, but which is real only in the after-life.
If we reflect, nevertheless, on the teachings of the Christian
Faith, we can see that this position cannot be true; St. Paul
insists on our believing in the resurrection of Christ as
well as in our own which is to take place in imitation of
His. So important does he think it is to believe in the resurrection
that he says that if Christ be not resurrected, our whole
Faith is vain, for it is through our resurrection that death,
the punishment for sin, is conquered, whereby we become human
persons again. Accordingly, Christians believe that the Blessed
Virgin, by her assumption, exists as a human person with Christ,
while the other saints await their final state. The Socratic
position, on the other hand, would rob death of its sting,
for it would mean the actual separation of two already separate
things, and not the cleavage which divides the human soul
from the body it had informed to make a man.
As in the previous example, Socrates' position arises from
the consideration of important truths, and he does explore
with remarkable intensity the life lived for the sake of the
truth as compared with the life of passion and animal appetite,
and shows their incompatibility--which suggests to him that
the body and the soul are conjoined as opposites which war
with each other. The Christian, however, by the doctrine of
original sin as well as by the other doctrines of his Faith,
can both see how Socrates could hold such a position, and
yet understand in a way closed to him the cause of that seemingly
essential opposition which leads him to deny the substantial
unity of soul and body, and finally to deny the importance
of the body except as a punishment for sin.
3) Both theologians and philosophers have always wondered
whether or how Divine foreknowledge is consistent with free
choice. Most of those who have considered this matter have
concluded that they are logically incompatible, and have either
upheld Divine foreknowledge at the expense of free choice
or maintained free choice by denying Divine foreknowledge.
Martin Luther, for example, in his Bondage Of The Will,
argues that since everything in God is necessary His foreknowledge
must be necessary, and since (he says) necessary knowledge
must be of necessary things, the human actions which God foreknows
are as a consequence necessary and not free. Spinoza argues
a similar position in Part I of his Ethics. Cicero,
on the other hand, in his Nature Of The Gods, holding
to freedom of choice as a fact of experience, feels constrained
to deny that God foreknows all things, despite the evident
impiety of such a view.
By contrast, St. Augustine in The City Of God and
in On Grace And Free Will shows unmistakably that Sacred
Scripture teaches both the infallible foreknowledge of God
and the freedom of the will. This indicates to St. Augustine
and to his Christian readers that the contradiction is only
apparent, and that their understanding of both Divine foreknowledge
and the nature of the human will is inadequate. Thus, in Book
V of The City Of God, he says that "against the
sacrilegious and impious darings of reason, we assert both
that God knows all things before they come to pass, and that
we do by our free will whatsoever we know and feel to be done
by us only because we will it." He then proceeds to consider
the arguments of Cicero and others in detail, and begins to
develop a more profound doctrine of Divine foreknowledge and
human freedom, a doctrine which is completed and perfected
by St. Thomas Aquinas. Instructed by faith, then, St. Augustine
is aware of his ignorance where many wrongly presume their
knowledge, is encouraged to undertake a difficult inquiry
by knowing beforehand that a solution is possible, and is
guided throughout by a knowledge of where his investigation
is heading.
These few examples illustrate, as could many more, that the
Catholic Faith is a guide in the intellectual life as well
as in the moral life for those who subject themselves to it,
and that the understanding is crippled radically when it refuses
to stand in the higher light which is given it. The acceptance,
however, of that higher light as a guide demands that one
restate and clarify in principle the whole of Catholic education,
and show it to be fundamentally superior to and different
from any education which is deprived, or which deprives itself,
of the strength conferred upon it by the teaching Church.
This view demands that the intellectual life be conformed
to the teachings of the Christian Faith, which stand as the
beginning of one's endeavors because they guide the intelligence
in its activities, and as the end (which we will see later)
because those endeavors are undertaken so that the Divine
teachings themselves may be more profoundly understood.
Next | Previous |
Contents |
