Aeterni Patris, Skeptic Edition

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I know a couple Catholic skeptics who have a visceral reaction to Thomism, and whenever they try to make their case to faithful Thomists, those Thomists play the Aeterni Patris card – that is, they refer to the 1879 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the restoration of Christian philosophy. It’s hard to be a faithful Catholic and argue with an encyclical, and this encyclical clearly favors Thomism. It seems to me these skeptics would do well to read Aeterni Patris and see if it really says what they’re told it says. It’s not long – at 34 paragraphs, I printed it out on 12 pages. I finished reading it not too long ago, and I don’t think these skeptics would have a problem with it if they read it honestly and humbly.

It’s important to note that Pope Leo isn’t writing a letter to Catholic skeptics but to Catholic bishops – which means the letter is pastoral and intended for people who already accept the Catholic faith; it’s not a philosophical treatise. To treat it like a philosophical treatise makes about as much sense as treating this blog post like a poem. To complain about my bad rhyme scheme, lack of meter, and prosaic style completely misses the point.

Pope Leo, being Catholic, has a different understanding of epistemology than hardcore skeptics or modern philosophers. The Catholic Church sees divine revelation as a sort of answer key in the back of the algebra textbook. If you work through the problem and your answer doesn’t match what’s in the answer key, you made a mistake somewhere; if you work through the problem and your answer does match what’s in the answer key, your method is probably reliable. Use the same method several times and keep getting matches with the answer key and we can be even more confident in your method. So, if you’re doing philosophy or science or any kind of learning and you reach a conclusion that contradicts Catholic teaching, you need to look at your data again and see what you missed.

You don’t have to like this, and this certainly doesn’t make for good apologetics, but this is how the Catholic Church has always understood knowledge. If the Creator of the universe tells you stuff about how the universe works, that’s the best information you’re going to get. If a creature who’s spent his whole life within the universe thinks and ponders and experiments for years and comes up with conclusions that sound right, that’s great – we should respect that person’s ideas and listen to them – but the Creator’s information is more reliable. If you already believe Catholicism in its entirety, you can be more certain of divine revelation than any other knowledge. If you don’t already believe Catholicism, this is a horrible place to start. “Believe! Because it’s the socially acceptable thing to do” is immature. It’s better to believe something because you’re convinced it’s true. When you get to a point where you’re convinced Catholicism is true, then divine revelation is your most certain knowledge. But not until then.

In Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo exhorts Catholics to study philosophy, basically because everyone else was; if reason is in vogue (as it was in the late 1800s), Catholics need to be able to use reason to explain and defend the faith. “Paul, the leader of the Christian army and the invincible orator, battling for the cause of Christ, skillfully turns even a chance inscription into an argument for the faith; for he had learned from the true David to wrest the sword from the hands of the enemy and to cut off the head of the boastful Goliath with his own weapon” (paragraph 7).

Pope Leo spends quite some time with this exhortation and a history of how Catholics have used philosophy, from the early Church onward. He also spends a lot of ink on how faith is a sure guide for philosophy, and how this is a big part of Thomas’s greatness, and a big part of modern philosophy’s weakness. “Moreover, to the old teaching a novel system of philosophy has succeeded here and there, in which We fail to perceive those desirable and wholesome fruits which the Church and civil society itself would prefer.” (paragraph 24) He also points out that philosophy is helpful in getting beyond facts of the natural world and into questions of the nature of things, laws, ethics, etc.

He also notes that when Thomas is taught, students should read actual Thomas. “Be careful to guard the minds of youth from those which are said to flow (from Thomas), but in reality are gathered from strange and unwholesome streams” (paragraph 31).

I found one piece, in paragraph 27, which my skeptic friends would probably take the most issue with:

“Many of those who, with minds alienated from the faith, hate Catholic institutions, claim reason as their sole mistress and guide. Now, We think that, apart from the supernatural help of God, nothing is better calculated to heal those minds and to bring them into favor with the Catholic faith than the solid doctrine of the Fathers and the Scholastics, who so clearly and forcibly demonstrate the firm foundations of the faith, its divine origin, its certain truth, the arguments that sustain it, the benefits it has conferred on the human race, and its perfect accord with reason, in a manner to satisfy completely minds open to persuasion, however unwilling and repugnant.”

On its face, this could be taken to mean Thomas satisfactorily answers the questions of modern philosophy, a claim my skeptic friends are deeply skeptical of. But given the overall context of the letter, I don’t think he is saying this. I think he (a) recognizes the need for Catholics to be great at philosophy, given the historical circumstances, (b) recognizes that Thomas was a genius and otherwise a really big deal in the history of Catholic theology and philosophy, and (c) thinks, therefore, that Thomas ought to be taught in Catholic institutions. Thomas legitimately has a lot to say, and to do Catholic higher education without studying him really doesn’t make any sense.