Divine Wisdom
and Christian Humanism
Father
Augustine Di Noia
23 February 2000
Polycarp has always been a favorite of mine. The benedictus antiphon for today's morning prayer includes a very famous sentence of his. He said, "for 86 years, Christ has been faithful to me, shall I now be unfaithful to him?" It is very well attested that those were among his very last words at his martyrdom. I doubt whether we will have the honor of being martyrs, but we know that our Holy Father thinks about it.
I want to take as my epigram, this wonderful phrase of George Weigel's which summarizes the Pope's mission to the world in his wonderful book, Witness to Hope. He speaks of the Pope articulating for us a vision of "an evangelically assertive and culture transforming Church." This is the kind of vision that we have to embrace, and, insofar as each of us are able each, we must advance it in our different ways. Thanks be to God, it doesn't depend on us alone.
Trinity and truth: the "epistemic primacy" of the doctrine of the Trinity
We must start with the Trinity. Lately, people have been saying to me, Gus, every time you talk, you find a way of talking about the Trinity. I am not shaken in my confidence that this is the right approach. I am borrowing the title of this part of my talk, "Trinity and Truth" from a wonderful, but very difficult and demanding theological and philosophical book, but I commend it to anybody out there hardy enough to take it on: Bruce Marshall's Trinity and Truth, just published by Cambridge University Press. It's a brilliant book about truth and how convictions about that truth are shaped by our faith.
I also borrow from him the expression, "epistemic primacy." In effect, this doctrine says that you always must start with the Trinity. Or to put it another way, also borrowing a wonderful phrase from another Lutheran theologian, "the Trinity is not a puzzle, but is itself the solution to all of the other puzzles." The reason I think we have to say this is that it is what Christ taught us, and therefore, what the apostles commended to the Church to continue to preach and what Christ himself bears witness to in our midst. It is the awesome truth that, God, who is in need of no one, desires to share the community of Trinitarian life, with what is not God.
Now, you know, we've gotten so used to this, we've gotten so used to thinking of the Trinity as something that is difficult to explain, a theological doctrine requiring a great deal of expertise, that we've tended to put it on the shelf. I know priests who dread having to preach on Trinity Sunday because they just don't know how to make sense of what they think is a complicated doctrine for people in the pew. This is a disaster. This doesn't mean that the Church doesn't still possess a very deep and strong Trinitarian faith, of course it does, but there is a reluctance to discover what huge, immense, practical implications the doctrine of the Trinity has for life, not to mention theology, but for life.
What the Christian Church proclaims to the world and shares with all of the churches that share the Nicean-Constatinopolitan Creed, is that nothing would exist--not us, not stars, not our universe--apart from this divine intention to have persons who are not God in the company of the persons who are. Given that it is a highly ramified truth it flows into all the other departments of human thought and life from the perspective of the Christian faith.
This is not something that could be known, it is a more personal thing. We are very familiar with this idea that you couldn't know this apart from God's revelation. It's like when you tell someone whom you love things about yourself that no one else knows. And we are not talking about revealing arcane truths in talking about the Trinity, we are talking about love, pouring itself out so that love will be returned. That is what the theology of the Trinity is about. Love will be returned in a way that is mutual, that is, it's not a matter of simply us loving God, it's a matter of us, altogether loving God and loving each other in God. This is the divine wisdom we have to proclaim: God wants to share the communion of the Trinitarian life with persons who are not God in Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Christian Humanism
From the perspective of the Church, this completely defines what it means to be human. That is, in view of that destiny we now understand how immense and magnificent a thing it is to be a human being. Commenting on Vatican II, the message John Paul II has affirmed over and over again to the world stresses that only Christ knows what is in man. We find the vision of what it means to be human only when we take a God's eye view.
Short of the God's eye view, we have nothing of the truth of the human person. I'm exaggerating, but we have only a very small core of the truth of what it means to be human. Only when we know that it is possible for human beings to share communion of the Trinitarian life, do we understand what being human is. Here you stand on absolute bedrock. I sometimes say to my students that you don't have to go to the wall for everything but you certainly have to go to the wall for this. You cannot edge, fudge, compromise, accommodate any of the things that I've said here or any of the things that are essentially connected with them. The catechism helps us a lot in understanding what that means.
The Fallacy of the Two Realms
It is a mistake to approach the issues of faith and culture, faith and reason, nature and grace--any of these pair--as if they were two realms that we have to relate to each other. This has occurred, in part, because of a catastrophic misreading of the St. Thomas Aquinas. People often think that it was Aquinas who affirmed, against the Augustianians (and there isn't some truth to this), the autonomy of the natural order. The simplest way, if perhaps a crude way, of explaining this is that for Augustine when you say "ultimate" end, you really mean "only." But it's a way of explaining the orientation of life that makes it difficult to give an account of subordinate ends, which are then ordered to a higher end.
It was one of the great contributions of Aquinas to western thought to have shown that to say "ultimate" is not to say "exclusive." But to say that no other subordinate end could ever take the place of the ultimate end, but it doesn't mean that subordinate ends couldn't be pursued.
So, in addition to loving God, I also have to shop, I have to feed my children. And those are not things that divert me from God, Aquinas insists, they point me to him. But a misreading of Aquians influenced Post-Enlightenment theologians, and in part some Catholic theologians and philosophers influenced by Descartes and Kant, to begin to think of these are two realms that needed to be related to each other: the realm of nature and the realm of grace, or the realm of reason and the realm of faith, or, now as we would say it in the 20th century, the realms of culture and faith.
When you read Aquinas carefully you see that he was totally Augustinian and, in that sense, Christian, in his view, that nothing could really be understood fully except in the perspective of grace or faith. So there is no time that nature exists or existed apart from God's intention to save us. In other words, if God created everyone, including the very first Adam and Eve, he created them with the intention of sharing his life with them.
There was never a time, in the Rousseauian understanding, of pure nature. Every period of the world is embraced by the divine intention to share his life with us, meaning embraced by grace. We must not think of ourselves as having the task of relating out faith to a culture. The culture is already embraced. We do have to Christianize, we do have to bring the faith to the culture where it is not there, but it is not a question of relating independent realms.
Non-apologetics Strategies
We must come to the world with the confidence that we have something valuable to say. By saying we should be non-apologetic, I do not mean that we should not be engaged in classical apologetics, that is making the faith intelligible to people who do not understand it. What I mean here by non-apologetic is to approach the world confident of the truth we possess. Being embarrassed by our faith happens all the time. Some treat their faith like having an old grandmother they don't like to bring out too much, because she will put everybody off. She is kept in a room apart from your friends because when she comes in, she asks them their names ten times or says something that you cringe at.
This is a catastrophic approach to bringing forth the truth because as soon as anyone sees that you are unsure of your faith, they lose interest in you. This is why the Pope has been able to circumvent middle management in the Church and reach young people who want to hear an uncompromising expression of the faith. The only thing worth giving your heart to, is something that is truly self-confident. As soon as you begin to be unconfident, then your presentation of the faith, including its difficult parts, loses its appeal.
The great gift of the theology of Von Balthazaar is: the glory of God shining on the face of Christ [quote or book?]. You don't have to worry that the truth will be enough. If you perform "Hamlet" with good actors who know their lines, you don't have to worry about whether it's going to work or not. You just put people in front of it and they will say, "Oh my God, this is great!" That's what Von Balthazaar says about presenting the Christian faith with confidence, there is no doubt about whether it will attract.
A lot of the talk about faith and culture in the past century had been apologetic in the wrong sense. When I say epistemic primacy of the doctrine of the Trinity, I mean that we approach all questions with the conviction that we, indeed, have something very powerful to contribute, because we are coming at it from the perspective of God, himself. Now, you say, isn't that arrogant? No, because we're not arrogantly taking that position to ourselves, He draws us into it.
The Challenge to the Academy: Faith and Reason
What we do in the academy shapes a great deal of what happens in the culture. Christians who do not know their faith will not be very good agents for the transformation of culture. My reflection on this has been affected very powerfully by something that one of the bishops said during the debate about Ex Corde Ecclesia on the floor of the conference.
The bishop at the conference said that he had been at an ecumenical meeting recently with Methodists and others. One of the Methodists, perhaps a clergyman, warned him that we, Catholics, should work very hard to assure the Catholic identity of our schools. The man knew about Ex Corde Ecclesia, and you'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know how many people tried to torpedo it. The man asked the bishop what he believed the "Methodist" in "Southern Methodist University" meant now. It was a rhetorical question, so he answered it, for himself: "Nothing," he said. The he said something extremely interesting, and worth pondering, he said, that one of the reasons why he thought that the Methodist church was declining, and some of the other mainline churches as well, is because they lost the capacity to transmit their faith to a lay leadership. They allowed their schools--as Jim Burtchell has shown with kind of great brilliance in the Dying of the Light-- to drift away from their church, despite all of the best intentions of the people who started that drift.
The reason I would I start with the academy, is that it seems to me that if you are going to talk about how the church ought to have an impact on the culture, you've got to train theologically sophisticated Catholics to have an impact it. Like the kinds of people sitting in this room.
One of the crucial ways in which this must be achieved is to recover the classical notion of the intelligibility of the faith in contrast to the Enlightenment, modern notion of the reasonability of the faith. This moves us back to my earlier discussion of the two realms.
What do I mean by this? A classical theologian, like St. Anselm, would have understood this distinction. St. Anselm coined the famous phrase "fides quaerens intellectum" (faith seeking understanding) to describe theology. Now what is this assumption? The presupposition that what is being studied is intrinsically intelligible, that faith seeking understanding is seeking the intelligibility of something, but it doesn't mean that the subject is necessarily opaque.
The divine mystery is not that we come up against darkness, but that we come up against something that is too bright. It's not a closure of understanding, but a continually drawing forth of understanding towards the object. So, when classical theologians came up against a difficult doctrine, they didn't automatically become incredulous. Let's take the perpetual virginity of Mary. It's a difficult doctrine because it doesn't make a whole lot of human sense to believe in it. She was--for the love of heaven!--a mother. You might say she was a virgin as the Church says, ante partum, before, but to say in partum and post partum--who could believe such a thing, how could such a thing be! But the classical theologian would say, the problem here is not with this truth, but with us. And, therefore, would seek to find the intelligibility in that truth.
In other words, for the classical theologian the truth of faith challenged the human intellect. The modern approach, which we see most notably in John Locke's "The Reasonableness of Christianity" (notice the innocent sounding word: reasonable), uses a different set of criteria because what reasonability sets up as the criteria for judgment is not the criteria that arrives from within the faith itself, but the criteria of human reason exercising certain judgment over what is or is not reasonable.
A lot of modern theology has been seduced by the criterion of reasonability, or as somebody might say, critical reasonability. The result is that you have to pair down articles of faith, rather than taking the entirety of the revelation in all of its complexity, richness, challenged difficulty. You pair it down so that you have a core that you can "live with." This is deadly, because now the faith has to pass the bar of human reason, whereas for classical theology it was just the opposite. Human reason had to pass the bar of faith.
From this way of thinking has emerged one of the most insidious abuses of the hierarchy of doctrines. The hierarchy of doctrines is treated as a way of ranking doctrines by their authority and as Avery Dulles has pointed out in an article we published in The Thomist. This of course was not what the Second Vatican Council meant by the hierarchy of doctrines. What the hierarchy of doctrines refers to is that all of the doctrines, which, you might say, seem not to be central, are not, therefore, dispensable, but only understandable with respect to a core.
Let me give you a very good example. We are all bodies with parts, fingers, toes, ears, livers, brains, hearts, now if I said to you, what is your most important part, most people would say either the brain or the heart. If I asked you what is your most least important part, you might say, your pinky. But the fact that you are able to identify important parts of your body with respect to less important ones, does not mean that you are prepared to part with any of the parts of your body. You are not prepared to part with pinkies, because they are not hearts.
Although this sounds funny, sometimes it's these kinds of examples that are the only ones that make sense to people. The hierarchy of doctrines is more correctly understood with an organic metaphor, because what the hierarchy of doctrine means is that doctrine like the perpetual virginity of Mary or sexual morality don't make sense apart from the core. It doesn't mean some beliefs are less important and therefore dispensable, it means that they don't work apart from the core and in this case, the core is the Trinity; The Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
So, you see, the criteria then for thinking about the faith and about the relation of faith to culture are the criteria that come from the classical view of theological inquiry which is to see the intelligibility of what is intrinsically intelligible, naturally using all of the capacities and rigor that human reason supplies. It's not a question of being unreasonable. Intelligibility is not the opposite of reasonability, but it's the tool of reason that is applied to the reflection on a mystery that itself draws the human mind and challenges it at every point.
Not everyone coming out of our institutions have to be theologians. (God help us if they were!) But it is the case, and you've all experienced this, that the people with highly sophisticated knowledge of economics, politics, physics, astronomy, law are traveling with an almost infantile level of knowledge of their faith. I've encountered them. They are traveling on the knowledge of their faith that they might remember from a 3rd grade class, or perhaps at 5th grade with their confirmation. After that they haven't learned a single thing. This makes them incapable of withstanding not only incorrect versions of Catholicism, but also versions of any kind of spirituality that are mad. The danger of irreligion is not skepticism, but credulity. People are prepared to believe anything in the name of religion, as you know.
This is why Ex Corde Ecclesia is so central, so important, so absolutely essential. Our institutions of higher learning must turn out people who know something about their faith and who are capable of articulating the ways in which it relates to whatever area of professional life, politics, science, philosophy, they are in, because God knows the clergy can't and are unlikely to do so.
The challenge to the public square
There are four areas where recent papal teaching has articulated a variety of propositions that need to be affirmed. Veritatas Splendor teaches that there's no freedom outside of truth, There is a slim change that human beings could find happiness outside of some proper understanding of what it is to be human. This does not mean that there are no truths that human beings can know about themselves, it just means we owe the world to proclaim the fullness of that truth.
We owe it to the world, not to come to the table, in the spirit of a pluralism of religions, or the pluralism of ideology as simply equal partners, but with conviction that we have something to contribute to shape the development of a consensus. If you've read these encyclicals, you know they stand on their arguments.
Evangelium Vitae tells us, contrary to what modernity thought, that the eclipse of belief in God has turned out to be the greatest threats to the human, not the exultation of the human. The fact that God was eclipsed, has not made human life safer, but more dangerous. The message of Evangelium Vitae, that God is the greatest friend of the human must be proclaimed without obsessing about this. Without a sense of the transcendent dimension of the human, you have what our Holy Father calls of "the culture of death."
The great irony at is that at the end of the 19th century the pope had to defend faith against reason, but here at the end of the 20th the pope has had to defend reason against unreason. Fides et Ratio is just the opposite of what one would expect. It's an exultation of the possibility of human beings to reach the truth about themselves and about the world. We cannot in our encounter with the world outside throw up our hands and say with Pontius Pilot, "What is truth?"
Finally, the whole, the tradition of social teaching has to be mined on every topic that it is possible to do so. (You ought to know, by the way, that a catechism of the social teaching of the Catholic Church is in preparation.) I know that a lot of people in this room spend a lot of their time working on communicating on issues of public policy, specifically, how Christian faith actually play out in its application.
I'm not an expert in applications, but my point here is that the conviction you bring to any dialogue on the transformation of the culture are convictions that rest on the deepest level of our faith and the Trinity. It's not just a matter of saying "We want everyone to be nice," It's good to want to be socially proactive and constructive, but Christians, Catholics especially, approach all of this with a perspective that is very profound on human nature, on society, and on sin. The death of Christ poses a solution to the problem of evil in the world with His rising. So you see what I mean when I say that we take a theological approach to these topics, not simply a public policy approach.
I read an awful lot of these documents at the conference and I often want to write on the front of them, and I do, sometimes, "God?" there has to be some way in which our approach to these issues reflects these deep convictions about God, about Trinity, about Christ, about what it means to be human, and so on. Otherwise we don't really have a whole lot to contribute to this discussion that is not contributed to it by people equally competent in these fields.
This lecture is the property of the Faith & Reason Institute.
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