Catholic Thinkers

"In the panoramic description of philosophy that Aristotle gives at the outset of his Metaphysics he makes us aware of the fact that 'philosophy' is an umbrella term that covers a number of different disciplines or sciences -- logic, mathematics, natural science, ethics, etc. -- yet having an overall telos as well. That is, it is not just a jumble of different inquiries, unrelated to one another, but rather an ordered set of disciplines which aim at a culminating inquiry -- in the divine.

On this basis, we can say that the goal of philosophy is theology. This is an internal goal. The theology based on Sacred Scripture may be thought of as the external goal of philosophy, the mistress to whom philosophy is handmaiden, but there is an intrinsic theology to philosophy and it is the point of the whole enterprise.

Does this mean that we will find among Aristotle's works one devoted exclusively to the divine? Does this mean that theology is a separate discipline like geometry or arithmetic or natural science? Well, why not? Geometry has its subject matter, so does arithmetic, and so does natural philosophy. What is to prevent there being a science whose subject matter is the divine?

What prevents it is the fact that we have no access to the divine of the kind that would be required for it to be the subject of a science. We would have to have a definition of God, for one thing. But all our talk about God is oblique and indirect, dependent on our knowledge and talk of other things, which are more easily accessible by us.

What we find as the wisdom toward which philosophy tends is the unwieldly treatise that later editors dubbed the Metaphysics, fourteen books which have given scholars trouble for two millennia."

-Excerpt from Introduction to Thomas Aquinas study materials, found at catholicthinkers.org

In his prologue to the moral part of the Summa theologiae, Thomas reflects on the meaning of the truth that man is made in the image and likeness of God. In this man is unique among creatures of the sublunary world. All creatures are like their creator to some degree -- as vestiges and shadows, as Bonaventure will say -- but man shares in capacities that give him dominion over his own life. He has an intellect and free will and thus can both know that which is fulfilling of him and responsibly pursue it.

"What would you select as an example that could stand for any changeable thing such that your analysis of it would be applicable to any of them?

Just as the child's confused knowledge of adults employs 'father' and 'mother', so the analysis of things that come to be as the result of a change, physical objects, we proceed in terms of particular examples. But it is not what is particular or peculiar to them that is at issue, but what they convey that would be true of any other physical object."

Aristotle uses this: Man becomes musical.

"Any change involves a subject."

"In any change, the subject comes to acquire a characteristic it did not previously have, indeed lacked. But being deprived of a characteristic and having that characteristic are contraries.

Thus, on the basis of his own analysis Aristotle concludes that, at a minimum, any change involves a subject and contraries. This coincides with what he took to be the implication of the various views of his predecessors. It is what they and he are talking about that explains this."

-Excerpt from Introduction to Thomas Aquinas study materials, found at catholicthinkers.org

"The most general way of contrasting philosophy -- and the theology in which it terminates -- with supernatural theology is as follows. The starting points or principles of philosophy are unarguable truths that everyone naturally knows. Philosophy presupposes the naturally and commonly known truths and its arguments will be persuasive to the degree that they build upon such truths."

"Supernatural theology differs from theology in this: that its starting points or principles are not what everybody naturally knows. Rather, its starting points are the mysteries of the faith, what is taken to be true not because it is understood but because God has told us it is true. The theology based on faith is a science which seeks to understand, or approximate understanding, of what has been revealed. But is it reasonable to believe to be true what we cannot in this life understand, truths such as the trinity of persons in God, the union of human and divine nature in Christ, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharists, etc.?"

"Something Thomas draws attention to again and again is that not everything God has revealed is beyond our ken. That revelation in the broad sense includes those truths about God that philosophers can know to be true -- that God is one, that there cannot be more than one God, that God is the cause of all else. Thomas calls this the Preambles of Faith. These make up a small, largely implicit subset of what has been revealed. And they are important because they provide the basis for an argument that it is reasonable to accept the mysteries of the faith, those truths we cannot understand."

"If some of the things that have been revealed are knowable -- the preambles of faith -- then it is reasonable to accept the mysteries of faith as true. This is an argument for the reasonableness of belief, not of the truth of the mysteries.

This makes it clear that the goal of philosophy is to know those truths which the theologian calls preambles of faith."

The full study materials for this lecture can be found at catholicthinkers.org

"This course is a brief effort to introduce a major thinker, always a risky enterprise. The task is compounded in the case of St. Thomas Aquinas since he was not only a theologian, but also a philosopher and a sacred poet. Chiefly, however, he was a member of the order founded by St. Dominic, the Order of Preachers, usually known as the Dominicans who sought his salvation as a priest under the three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. That his life was a short one, 1225-1274, less than half a century, in no way decreases the difficulty of giving a brief introduction to his thought. An enormous number of writings by Thomas have come down to us, some of them planned, some of them products of his task as a teacher, many occasional, responses to specific requests he felt obliged to honor.

The first lecture gives an idea of the task before us."

This is an excerpt taken from Ralph McInerny's study materials. See full study materials at catholicthinkers.org.

“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.”  Thus began John Paul II’s great encyclical on faith and reason, Fides et Ratio. 

Sadly, what John Paul II joined together in marriage, too many in the modern world have attempted to put asunder, seeing faith and reason as not only incompatible, but in opposition to one another.  The Catholic Church, by contrast, has always taught that the truths of faith and the truths of reason will ultimately not contradict one another because both have God as their Author. 

In these two thirty-minute lectures, Ralph McInerny introduces listeners to that great encyclical and to the Church’s perennial teaching on the relationship between faith and reason.”