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On The Intellectual Needs of Ordinary People | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | June 20, 2006
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"Like many countries,
however, Canada is today suffering from the pervasive effects of secularism. The
attempt to promote a vision of humanity apart from God's transcendent order and
indifferent to Christ's beckoning light, removes from the reach of ordinary men
and women the experience of genuine hope. One of the more dramatic symptoms of
this mentality, clearly evident in your own region, is the plummeting birth
rate." -- Benedict XVI, To Bishops of
Canada/Atlantic, May 20, 2006 (Benedict XVI, Ad Limina Visit, Canadian Bishops
from the Atlantic Region, L'Osservatore Romano, June 7, 2006, 5.)
I.
The Catholic Church has
regularly recognized that a practical distinction, not one of nature, existed between
what might be called "intellectuals" and "ordinary" folks, or, to put it more
colloquially, between "nerds" and "blokes," or between college deans and truck
drivers, all of whom belong to the same human species with their own dignity. This
distinction is not similar to the one between men and angels, or between men
and beasts. But it does recognize that different levels of intelligence,
virtue, energy, choice, and opportunity do exist among men such that some have
more talent, interest, or time to devote themselves to what are known as the
affairs of intelligence. It is but an aspect of the general division of labor
that makes a common good possible. Not everyone can be a professional
philosopher, not everyone can be a cook, while some philosophers are also cooks
and some cooks philosophers.
However, when it comes to its
own mission in the world, the Church addresses itself to both groups, to all
groups. The distinction based on intelligence was not the same as that between
those who will be saved and those who will not. There are canonized thinkers
and beatified beggars. Hell presumably has both thinkers and paupers.
Aristotle, likewise, thought that ordinary people were able to see many things
of reason just by their native insight, by their common sense, obvious things
that the more gifted minds sometimes missed. Generally we assume, moreover--because
pride is more apt to be the vice of the intellectual--that it is more difficult
to save one's soul if he is an intellectual than if he is, say, a peasant or
even business executive. Compared to pride, greed and self-indulgence are
relatively mild, though still potentially lethal, forms of vice. Likewise, both
intellectuals and poor people can lose their souls in their own contexts of
life, if they so choose. Neither have an automatic exemption from
responsibility for their own acts.
The danger of recent rhetoric
about "options for the poor" is that it tends to deprive the impoverished of
their intrinsic human dignity by implying that no wrong perpetrated by them is
caused by themselves. Rather, all faults are said to be caused by environment
or "structures" of society, whatever they might be. This dangerous theoretical
position is a hold over--an intellectual hold over--from the influence of
Rousseau in modern thought. To put the issue more positively, we can have
saints who are poor, saints who are rich, and saints who are everywhere
in-between. The same obviously holds true for sinners. What we cannot have is a
saint or a sinner who is automatically made so by his external social condition
alone.
Nor, to cover the other
extreme, is it true that our political and social institutions make no
difference at all in our moral character. Aristotle quite clearly maintains, as
does Aquinas following him, that a certain sufficiency of wealth and political
participation is advisable for the possibility of virtue for ordinary people. The
real issue here is what kind of political, moral, and economic ideas and
institutions cause this sufficiency to come into being through the workings of
human enterprise itself. Many theories and ideas about helping the poor do not
help them, even when it is claimed that they do. Not a few ideas even destroy
them. In practice, the intention to help someone, whatever his situation, is
not by itself a guarantee that the help will do what it is supposed to do. The
poor should not be conceived as objects of one's social experiments.
II.
The ordinary presupposition
of St. Thomas' discussion of the need of "divine law," that is, revelation, is
that most people either do not have the time or the intelligence to figure out
by themselves certain basic truths about their lives and destiny--truths that are
really necessary for us to know to be saved. Catholicism does think that ideas
make a difference, even for salvation, especially for salvation. The Lord did
not neglect the intellect when it comes to our final status before Him. Among
other reasons, this recognition of the importance of truth, which is what it
really is, is why we recite the Creed at Sunday Mass. What we affirm is meant
to be true about the very Godhead. We do not really want to be saved apart from
our knowing and assenting to what God and the world are all about.
Common or busy people, of
course, might suspect that God exists, might even have certain plausible
arguments for it, but they are often bewildered by the intricacies of the
various proofs, be they Aquinas' five ways, or any others. They are also
confused by the myriads of media, educational, and cultural views that deny any
God at all, or any possibility of taking Him seriously. Most normal folks
suspect that something is skewered in such seemingly persuasive arguments for
atheism or relativism, but they cannot just put their finger on the main
problem, which may not be intellectual at all. Nor do intellectuals always get
it straight either. This is why Benedict XVI speaks of the effect of revelation
as working for the "purification of reason" (Deus Caritas Est, 29). To understand revelation aright requires the
prior ability to understanding anything aright.
But in order that everyone
might have a fair chance on this score of understanding something solid about
God's existence, revelation was given to us--to anyone willing to listen, to
affirm the existence of God at least by faith. Chesterton humorously thought
this was God's way of being "democratic," of leveling the odds in the direction
of the common man against the intellectual. Once we know that God exists, be it
by faith or reason or both, our whole outlook on the world will be different
and more coherent. If we cannot ourselves reason to God's existence, divine
authority, through Christ's presence in the world, has assured us of what
minimal things we need to know, one of which is that He exists and has concern
for us.
Vatican I held that the
existence of God can be demonstrated by reason, though it did not necessarily
indicate anyone who so proved it, though Aquinas comes to mind. Some
intellectuals still controvert these proofs; other intellectuals still seek to
show why they hold. All Vatican I meant by its affirmation that the human
intellect could "prove" the existence of God was that our minds as such are not
flawed instruments, deceiving us at every stage. Their very workings do not
intrinsically prevent us from concluding to God's existence, as would be the
case, say, if what we knew was an image of reality and not reality itself.
Our minds are instruments or
powers of our souls by which we do know what is. A philosophy that locks us up in our own minds is a
flawed philosophy, rather prevalent in modernity. There are, moreover,
philosophers and scientists so afraid of the implications of this conclusion
about the capacity of our minds to know reality that they invent
counter-philosophies maintaining that the mind cannot know anything, except
perhaps what it wants or imagines. The mind does not, it is held, reach
anything but itself, and this not clearly. So it is concluded to be "logical"
that we be concerned only with ourselves--which selves, in turn, have no inner
nature or order of their own. This leads to a form of modern liberty that
evaporates any distinction between what is natural and what is unnatural,
between what is right and what is wrong, between what is and what is not.
III.
Not too long ago, I read a
remark of a French "worker priest" who said that the cause of atheism in the
modern world was much more fostered by critiques of the book of Genesis than by
problematic social conditions, so often said to be its cause by social
theorists. Put in other words, ordinary people, from grammar school on, are
bombarded from every side by evolutionary premises based, supposedly, on the "undoubted"
scientific certainty that God could not possibly have had anything to do with
this world's cosmic history, including especially the appearance of man. The
recurring flap over "intrinsic design," as even a remote hypothesis, again
leaves most ordinary people confused.
Yet, surveys still show that
most American people still believe there is a plan or design both in the cosmos
and in our history. In his recent Pentecost sermon, Benedict XVI said that "the
world in which we live is the work of the Creator Spirit. . . . The world does not
exist by itself; it is brought into being by the creative Spirit of God, by the
creative Word of God" (Vigil of Pentecost, June 3, L'Osservatore Romano, English, June 7. 2006, 6). Obviously, Christians
maintain that an impossible contradiction does not exist between the notion
that "the world does not exist by itself" and a science that seeks to explain
what the cosmos is all about. Behind proposed theories of evolution "from
nothing and for nothing" usually lie moral theories that anticipate and reject
the human implications that follow from God's existence. The opposition to
"intrinsic design" and other notions of the compatibility of science and
revelation is, I suspect, more moral than scientific, an effort to preserve the
way one lives rather than an explanation of the world as it is.
What is particularly
interesting in Pope Ratzinger's comment to the Canadian bishops, however, is
the effect on ordinary people that he sees in removing a "vision of humanity"
in which its explanation is God and Christ, the Word in which all is made. Literally,
he says, what happens is a widespread loss of hope. From this loss, if we
follow population trends, we see "plummeting birth rates." It is fascinating
that such a connection is made by the Pope. For some time it has become more
and more obvious that the most prosperous countries in the world are dying for
lack of their own children. We would have expected just the opposite really. Prosperity
should lead to the abundance of more life, not death.
The Holy Father has touched
on something fundamental. A connection exists between belief in God and the
very continuation of human life on this planet and what it takes, both in terms
of will and effort, to do so. Precisely "ordinary men and women" need this
hope most as it is from them that most of our future human comes.
What is the conclusion to be
drawn from these remarks of the Pope to the Canadians about hope and
population? It is that the denial of God and a "transcendent order," which it
is the very object of revelation to affirm, has tangible effects at the very
core of civilization. A people, as we are seeing in Europe, rather quickly dies
as a people once they have no reason other than themselves for which to live. With
no hope in something beyond themselves even in this world, a hope normally
associated in most societies with children, we are left with neither God or
life. .
Ordinary people do have the
intellectual needs that faith provides. They need to know that the world is
created and that there is an order in it. "Secularism" does have "pervasive
effects," visible ones, before our very eyes, if we choose to see them. It is
ironic that the reasons given by Aquinas for why it might be "reasonable" to
find revelation are also the ones best suited to keep us sane and present in
this world. These are the need to have a clear notion that God exists, that He
directs our inner thoughts, that He rewards the good and punishes the evil, that
we must more clearly know what is right and wrong. These reasons, it turns out,
are not just things that deal with our supernatural destiny, as they do, but
also reasons we must need and understand, be we intellectuals or ordinary
people, even to keep ourselves in existence.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links:
IgnatiusInsight.com author
page for Joseph Ratziger/Pope Benedict XVI
Are Truth, Faith,
and Tolerance Compatible? | Joseph Ratzinger
Author page for Fr.
James V. Schall, S.J., with listing of all IgnatiusInsight.com articles
A Short
Introduction to Atheism | Carl E. Olson
C.S. Lewis
books and resources from Ignatius Press
C.S. Lewiss
Case for Christianity | An Interview with Richard Purtill
The Relevance
and Challenge of C. S. Lewis | Mark Brumley
Paganism and
the Conversion of C.S. Lewis | Clotilde Morhan
The Thought
and Work of C. S. Lewis | Carl E. Olson
Seeking Deep
Conversion | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
Is Religion
Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson
Fr.
James V. Schall, S.J., is Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown
University.
He is the author of numerous books on social issues, spirituality, culture,
and literature including Another
Sort of Learning, Idylls
and Rambles, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing,
Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing,
and A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning.
Read more of his essays on his
website.
Visit
the Insight Scoop Blog and read the latest posts and comments by
IgnatiusInsight.com staff and readers about current events, controversies,
and news in the Church!
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