From the bulletin of October 11, 2020
Philosophy. Today, that’s a word that automatically evokes boredom. People hear it and think of intellectuals who are out of touch or of absent-minded professors rambling about things that don’t matter. And there’s some good reason people react this way. Too often, philosophy is all abstract and disconnected from reality. Bizarre theories and horrendous moral arguments have come out of philosophy. The philosophies behind the Holocaust and people like Stalin are certainly evil and deserve to be discredited. So, our popular culture treats philosophy in general as something not worth paying attention to.
The irony is that that attitude is actually a kind of philosophy. We’d call it “pragmatism,” and most Americans default to this way of thinking. It is summed up by saying “what will this do for me or other people in the real world?” The sad part is that our rejection of all philosophy has actually made us easier to influence. Ideas matter. How a person thinks affects how they act. How they act affects the culture and the people around them. Even when we don’t have all the proper terms and definitions clear in our minds, ideas spread and influence the way a culture looks at the world. Our culture is increasingly anti-Christian primarily because of the influence of bad philosophy. By rejecting all philosophy, we’ve actually robbed ourselves of the ability to recognize and defend against the philosophies that are the most dangerous.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Pope Leo XIII in 1879 published a document called Aeterni Patris (Eternal Father) to specifically address philosophy. For a large part of history in the western world, people more or less held to the idea of Realism. This philosophy is basically the idea that the world outside our minds is real, that we can learn how this world works, and that what we learn can teach us about ourselves and even about the God who created it. In the middle ages, some people started to question that idea and come up with a variety of theories that the world wasn’t as “real” as we thought. “How do I know that what I see/touch/hear is real?” That question, in time, led to a wide variety of bizarre answers. Everything from the belief that we are programs in a computer to the idea that our minds make reality and can change it comes from how people answer that question.
It can get super complicated, but the problem is that disconnecting our minds from reality, we make it that much harder for people to recognize the God who created it. It also makes it harder for people to recognize what it means to be a human being. Pro-choice, transgenderism, and moral relativism (right and wrong change for different people) are all connected to this problem. Pope Leo XIII saw a lot of this coming, so he urged people to return to a sensible study of philosophy. The Pope’s letter spends time looking at important figures in the history of the Church and how they used philosophy, which included science in ancient times, to prepare people to accept faith. There are a lot of arguments using just reason to prove that God exists. Using philosophy, ancient defenders of the faith could get people to believe that there is a God and then they could use faith to help them know who that God is. Rather than just being a bunch of private theories, philosophy used to include training and practice in thinking clearly. Logic is part of philosophy. By helping people to think clearly, philosophy can help people to better understand what God tells us about himself through Scripture and Tradition. With the breakdown of public trust in this practice, it became harder to help people know and understand God and what God revealed in and through the Church. This is the reason that some people look at our faith and are completely baffled. They see the world in a totally different way.
In particular, Pope Leo XIII pointed people to study the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (who we looked at a while back). St. Thomas wasn’t right about everything, but he was really good at connecting faith and reason, theology and philosophy, religion and science. As a result of this letter, people throughout the world took another look at his philosophy and sought ways to connect it to the modern world. To this day, all priests are required to learn some philosophy (usually a lot from St. Thomas Aquinas) so that they can both understand and respond to the ideas floating around in society today.
When you hear the world philosophy, try not to roll your eyes and tune it out. Instead, think of it as practice in thinking clearly. God gave us the ability to think, so we should be eager for anything that helps people think clearly and reject what makes it harder.
In Christ,
-Fr. Albert