Fr. Stanley Jaki on The Catholic Intellectual

The Catholic Intellectual | Fr. Stanley L. Jaki | Ignatius Insight

The expression, "Catholic Intellectual," may seem to involve a twofold superfluity, suggestive of some contradiction. Is it not superfluous to write the word "catholic" as "Catholic" if "catholic" truly stands for an appreciation of the whole range of reality and values? And can such an appreciation be truly at work if it is not also the work of the intellect?

The apparent conflict between "catholic" and "Catholic" will especially bother intellectuals who take ideas and not facts for their starting point. Consideration of facts certainly must come first as long as one wants to come up with something tangible about the predicaments, duties, and prospects of Catholic intellectuals. A most relevant fact in this respect can be noticed by the Catholic intellectual if he considers the beginning of the wide usage of the word "catholic," a Greek word by origin.

Surprising as it may seem, the word "catholic" occurs only here and there in the writings of ancient Greek philosophers. While Aristotle, for instance, often uses the adverb kath'olou (on the whole or in general), he never uses its adjectival form catholikos or its feminine and neutral variants. The reason for this may lie in the Greeks' contempt for all others, whom they gladly lumped under the term barbaroi. Greek philosophers did not even draw in full the logic of the idea, widely entertained by them, that the individual mind was but a bit from the universal mind into which the former was reabsorbed following the bodily death. For if such was the case, the mind of each individual must have had a truly catholic or universal character, even if in its bodily framework the mind was not Greek but barbarian.

The failure of the Greeks to see this was, of course, rooted in their inability to look beyond the mind to the personhood of each individual. That personhood revealed its infinite value only within Christianity. In the measure in which Christians surrendered to the incomparable fact of Jesus Christ, as the Incarnate Son of God, they were able to perceive in full what it meant for man to have been "made in the image of God."

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