If only philosophers could wake up to a sense of God
Universities need to rediscover the old tree of Catholic philosophy, argues Lucy Beckett

12 March 2010

God, Philosophy, Universities
by Alasdair Macintyre
Continuum
£16.99

In this short book MacIntyre makes a powerful case for a new sense of unity of purpose in the quest for truth in universities which are fragmented into autonomous disciplines seeing no reason to communicate either with each other or with the world beyond the academy. “Seeing no reason” pinpoints the problem.

More than 20 years ago, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre, the most distinguished Catholic philosopher in the English-speaking world, showed that after three centuries of tradition-free thought no neutral ground, no “principles of shared rationality”, have been established.

Instead, not only the secular academic disciplines, including philosophy, but individual philosophers have pursued their own kinds of rationality, their own kinds of truth, now usually described as “truth”.

A Catholic, however, believes, and a trained Catholic philosopher can demonstrate that no truth is ever in conflict with any other because all truth is in God.

To encourage in educated Catholics the confidence that this is the case, and to open the minds of others to the possibility that it may be, MacIntyre here gives a brief, lucid survey of the history of Catholic philosophy so that its roots in Christian late antiquity and in medieval Islamic and Jewish thought informed by Aristotle may be understood as still supporting a living tradition, a tree whose stout trunk is Thomism. Aquinas took his theology from Augustine and his philosophy from Aristotle and made something new, and of great resilience, from the conjunction.

Augustine is therefore an essential but preliminary figure in the tradition which is MacIntyre’s subject.

With little knowledge of Aristotle beyond elementary logic, Augustine was an amateur philosopher, but he knew that, in MacIntyre’s words, “philosophy understood from the standpoint of faith has an indispensable part to play in Christian thinking in spite of its limitations, limitations that philosophers cannot recognise except from the standpoint of faith”.

This balance is hard to sustain in any discussion of philosophy in relation to faith.

Other Christian precursors of Thomism MacIntyre praises as more (Boethius) or less (the Pseudo-Dionysius and Anselm) close to the recognition of “philosophical enquiry as a secular and autonomous activity”.

The Muslim commentators on Aristotle, however, and the Jewish scholar Maimonides, theist philosophers whose work became known in the medieval Latin world, contributed, at the same time as Latin translations of Aristotle himself, the precision of Aristotelian terminology and method to the work of Aquinas.

The Thomist setting forth of truths about God, the soul and created reality in the high-powered university atmosphere of the 13th century was not achieved without dispute. This was a period when, in MacIntyre’s words, theology was the “hegemonic academic discipline”, and there were those who felt that Aquinas was taking theology too far in the direction of secular philosophy.

But MacIntyre’s central chapters splendidly explain the essentials of Thomism so that it is possible to see his project, for all the difficulty of arguments which can be grasped only by those with philosophical skills, as a demonstration of the rational coherence which supports the Christian beliefs that direct the lives of “plain persons”.

Particularly striking is MacIntyre’s explanation of why theists disagree with atheists not just about the existence of God as an addition to the understanding of the world, but about everything, “about what it is to find anything whatsoever intelligible rather than unintelligible”. It is for this reason that MacIntyre knows that the modern university so desperately needs a philosophical awakening into a sense of God.

The rest of the book records the fragmentation of Thomism in the later Middle Ages, the choppy passage of philosophy from scholasticism to scepticism, with, after Descartes, the loss of the certainty that God is necessary to the understanding of anything – there are a few fine pages on the exceptional contribution of Pascal – and the moment of vision that was Newman’s prescription for a university founded on “that special philosophy, which I have made to consist in a comprehensive view of truth in all its branches”.

The specific revival of Thomism, water for the old tree, came with Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, but this was a mixed blessing, soon producing dessicated textbook versions of Aquinas’s teaching for classrooms.

One thinks of Balthasar as a young Jesuit, clever enough for anything, stopping his ears in neo-Thomist lectures to read the Augustine on his lap.

Some 20th-century philosophers, Catholics and not, enriched the tradition – MacIntyre writes of Husserl, Edith Stein, Wittgenstein and Elizabeth Anscombe – but it took Pope John Paul II, himself a philosopher, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio to recall the Church, and anyone else who might be listening, to the value for us all of the Catholic philosophical tradition.

MacIntyre ends with the hope that anyone teaching anything anywhere, but particularly in universities, in which the hegemonic discipline, if it exists, is nowadays economics, will return to the old tree to rediscover that “in directing ourselves toward truth we direct ourselves toward God”.

It is a hope rooted in faith and in love.