Breaking Free of Our Metaphysical Winter | Brian Jones | Homiletic & Pastoral Review
On Why Christians Must Study Philosophy
In diagnosing the philosophical mentality of modernity, the Catholic novelist-physician-philosopher, Walker Percy, once wrote the following:
The distinction which must be kept in mind is that between science and what can only be called “scientism.” . . . {Scientism} can be considered only as an ideology, a kind of quasi-religion––not as a valid method of investigating and theorizing which comprises science proper––a cast of mind all the more pervasive for not being recognized as such and, accordingly, one of the most potent forces which inform, almost automatically and unconsciously, the minds of most denizens of modern industrial societies like the United States.1
The modern mind has cultivated, both knowingly and unknowingly, what Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI referred to in his Regensburg Address “the self-limitation of reason,” a pathology that reduces the capacity of human intelligence to actually arrive at truth. This reductionist account of human knowing has stirred within modern man a philosophical relativism, a worldview that denies our ability to know anything outside of our own minds. As a result, all that we have access to is what our minds create, thereby rejecting the whole structure of reality as a given, as something already there to be known and discovered through further inquiry and investigation. For Percy, and Benedict as well, this self-limitation of reason has been coupled with “scientism,” the ideological view that reduces claims regarding truth to what can be experimentally verified in the humanistic and physical sciences. Questions regarding religion, ethics, politics, happiness, and man’s ultimate destiny become restricted as solely belonging to the domain of science, elevating both science and technology to the level of metaphysics or theology. Man is no longer a truth seeker, oriented in his being to pursue that which he was made for, but did not himself make. “Sundered from that truth,” writes Blessed Pope John Paul II:
Individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened, therefore, that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and, little by little, has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.2
What the Pope is highlighting here is the fact that being is mind-independent, and the entirety of reality, all that is, has an integral relationship to the human intellect. At the pinnacle of this investigation of being is Being himself, the Being who is the fullness of what is, and who is without imperfection or limitation. Although it is true that the human mind is finite, and tainted by the stains of original and actual sin, it can, nevertheless, transcend the empirical, for this capacity is a given along with our created human nature. For the Pope, and Catholicism as well, human intelligence has a positive capacity to know the order and structure of reality, and can also acquire a genuine, albeit limited, knowledge of God. If emphasis is placed upon the ways in which our knowledge is limited or even deceptive, as is the case with modern philosophy, then our access to reality, to the authentic moral good, and ultimately to God, will be diminished and negated.
Contra this relativistic malaise of modernity, the Pope offers a solution pertaining to the science of philosophy, specifically outlining the sapiential character of philosophical inquiry. The Holy Father states that we must recover a philosophy that has a:
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