RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN CANADA.

Catholic Insight started its second series of articles on the history of English-speaking Canadian Catholics by sketching the impact of Father Henry Carr (1880-1961) on Catholic education in Canada (December 1999, pp. 32-36). This included the founding of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) in 1929, a centre for the study of medieval philosophy and related subjects.

In this lengthy second article, Fr. Leonard Kennedy first briefly sketches the history of philosophy as taught in Catholic colleges throughout North America around the middle of the twentieth century--using Pope John Paul's 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio as the point of departure. Subsequently, he introduces the great French historian of Christian philosophy, Etienne Gilson, who lectured in Toronto for many years, followed by a tribute to Father Joseph Owens, a long-time professor at PIMS.

Philosophy at a dead end?

In September 1998 (C.I., page 11)I provided a brief overview of the Pope's encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason). The encyclical was written out of concern for the modern world's lack of acceptance of anything absolute whether in the area of truth or of moral behaviour. Like Pontius Pilate, most modern philosophers think that no one can know the truth. One might say that philosophy has come to a dead end. Meanwhile for many people theology has been rejected as pie in the sky. With this state of disarray in mind, Pope John Paul reflects on both philosophy (the work of reason) and theology (the fruit of faith).

Section IV of the encyclical deals with the historical relations between the Catholic faith and philosophy from the beginning of Christianity until the present day. When Christianity began it was accepted mainly by ordinary people, such as fishermen and tax collectors, and later often by slaves. In the first few centuries there were few "intellectual" Catholics. Yet some of these few had an interest in philosophy. St. Paul debated in Athens with Epicureans and Stoics; and St. Justin (d. 155), who had studied Greek philosophy without being satisfied with it, discovered in his new-found Catholicism the answers to the questions he asked, and called this religion his "philosophy" (#36, 38).

The Greeks

Philosophy traditionally means the study of the ultimate questions by means of human experience and human reasoning alone, without the aid of religion. Indeed, by Our Lord's time, Greek philosophy had become quite critical of the purported "revelation" of Greek religion, and had separated itself from it. When, in the fourth century, a large number of intellectuals had converted to Catholicism or had been born into it, they confronted Greek philosophy to find in it a number of acceptable teachings and a number of errors. The greatest of these Catholic scholars was St. Augustine (354-430). He liked Plato's philosophy because it was theistic and highly moral, and it accepted a next life.

On the other hand, for Plato there were many gods, and his notion of human destiny involved reincarnation. And, though Plato came closer to it than any other Greek philosopher, no Greek philosopher had taught that God, or the gods, were creative, producing the universe out of nothing. Augustine, like the other Catholic scholars, realized that even the best of Greek philosophies contained errors. They saw that it was not sufficient simply to point out that theology and philosophy could not contradict one another since both were true if properly arrived at, and all truth comes from God. It was therefore necessary to examine the starting-points of Greek philosophies and to see whether the teachings alleged to follow from these starting points actually did so.

What these theologians discovered was that philosophy can take the discovery of truth only so far, and that in order for the human mind to go farther it needs the help of theology. This was true even concerning philosophical truths. In order for philosophy to avoid error and to grasp the highest naturally knowable truths it needed the help of theology. Theoretically this did not have to be the case, but the history of philosophy tells us that it was the case, in part, no doubt, because of original sin and personal sin, which darken the mind (#42-43).

Medieval universities

This conviction, that theology needs philosophy, and philosophy needs theology, was put into practice in the medieval universities, which began about 1200. According to many Catholic scholars, including the present Pope, it found its greatest advocate in St. Thomas Aquinas (122574) (#78).

In Faith and Reason there is frequent mention of metaphysics, which is the philosophical study of reality above the physical universe, if such reality exists. It is thus the philosophical study of being, since this notion applies to any reality, whether physical or supraphysical. Aquinas's basic metaphysical position, which no one had held before him, was that the existence of something is not simply the fact that it exists but the act it exercises in order to keep itself outside of nothingness. Creatures are natures which have received this act, and God is an unreceived, and therefore infinite, act of existing. From this it follows that God is infinite goodness, that he possesses infinite knowledge and power, that there is only one God, and that he is infinitely happy.

Separation of philosophy and theology

Thomism, the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas, lasted, with varying fortunes, until the religious revolt often called the Protestant Reformation, which began in the early 1500s. Martin Luther (1483-1546), who was not a Thomist, caused a death-blow to philosophy among his followers because he taught that human reason is so wounded by original sin that it is helpless in the search for ultimate truth. And the revolt created such an upheaval in the realm of ideas that philosophy was in chaos.

The new direction in philosophy was given by Rene Descartes (1594-1650), who made the mistake of saying that, since all our knowledge is in our mind, all we know is what is in our mind. This raised the problem of how we know that the physical world is real. Descartes thought that he could prove that it is by appealing to the veracity of God, but his argument for the existence of God is erroneous. And a logical result of this legacy of Descartes was the conclusion of David Hume (1711-76) that there are no physical things and, by the same token, no human minds either, so that what appears to us as causality is simply an appearance of causality. And, if causality is simply an illusion, there is no reason to posit a creating God.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was unsatisfied with Hume's conclusions and thought that he could better them by saying that there is an extra-mental reality but that it is unknowable. What we know of it is what is produced by our own mind in contact with it, and this knowledge of its appearances is purely subjective, even though it is the same for all of us because we all have the same kind of minds. Unfortunately, it's not the right kind of mind for knowing reality except as it is filtered (and thus falsified) by our minds. Causality, as with Hume, is subjective, and thus there is no proof of a creating God, though we can posit a God to make morality credible. This still leaves, however, the possibility that morality is as subjective and thus as illusory as the physical world.

Hume and Kant have had a tremendous influence on modern philosophers and thus have led to widespread scepticism and atheism, or at least agnosticism. In France the French Revolution, beginning in 1789, also led to atheism. In England the first atheist to have been deliberately raised as such by his father was John Stuart Mill (1806-73). But the philosopher of atheism par excellence was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). His influence was, and still is, great. The philosophy called Existentialism, according to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), is but the logical consequence of atheism.

Modern times

By the nineteenth century the philosophy of Aquinas, which had frequently flourished and then waned, was perhaps at its lowest point. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris, which attributed the poor state of theology and philosophy in Catholic seminaries and universities to a neglect of the study of medieval writers, and particularly of St. Thomas. The encyclical, along with the steps taken by Pope Leo to re-enforce it, bore fruit in many countries, including Canada.

One of these fruits in Canada was the founding of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto in 1929 (see "Henry Carr", Dec., 1999, pp. 34-35). The Institute became a world leader in teaching Aquinas's philosophy, with great men such as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Gerald Phelan, Anton Pegis, James Weisheipl, Armand Maurer, Ignatius Eschmann, Edward Synan, and Joseph Owens.

Today, Pope John Paul praises the work of Leo XIII a hundred years ago in advocating Catholic philosophy, and especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas, and he urges the study of Catholic philosophy in seminaries and Catholic universities (#105-106). He states that "the most influential theologians of the present century, to whose thinking and research the Second Vatican Council was much indebted, were products of this revival of Thomistic philosophy. Throughout the twentieth century, the Church has been served by a powerful array of thinkers formed in the school of the Angelic Doctor [St. Thomas]." And the Pope, speaking of "the study not just of Scholastic [medieval] philosophy but more generally of the study of philosophy itself," says that he cannot "fail to note with surprise and displeasure that this lack of interest in the study of philosophy is shared by not a few theologians" (#58).

Catholic philosophers today

A 1979 survey of Catholic universities and colleges in the United States showed that many of them had become indifferent to Catholic philosophy and to the type of philosophers they were hiring. Claiming that Catholic institutions "are vague and confused about their objectives and their nature," the survey continued:

"In many 'Catholic, colleges, a good number of professors are either not basically committed to passing on a Catholic tradition in any definable sense of the term or, if they are, they find their own work...not relevant to any properly Catholic objective....Some 'Catholic' colleges...judged 'the Catholic philosophical tradition to be either of small or of no relevance whatever to their teaching.' The chairman of philosophy in one large 'Catholic' university replied that none of almost a dozen full-time philosophers found the Catholic philosophic tradition relevant to their teaching."'

Now, if philosophy separates itself from theology, and downplays theology, this is bound to lead to an attempt by it to take the place of theology and to consider itself the higher wisdom. This attitude of rationalism then leads to nihilism, which denies even the possibility of answering ultimate questions, which in turn prevents commitment to anything because "everything is fleeting and provisional" (#45-46).

This is what has happened in the world today. Some Catholics have become fideists, who believe what Christ teaches through his Church but find no strong basis for this in philosophy and human reason. Others, relying on a philosophy separated from faith, have found their faith weakening and perhaps finally dying. The cure for this malady will not be a sudden one. It will take a renewal like that inspired by Pope Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris. Faith and Reason has been intended by Pope John Paul to spark such a renewal.

Let me now go back to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and recall the labours of the great historian of Christian philosophy, Etienne Gilson, and one of his prominent disciples, Fr. Joseph Owens.

Etienne Gilson

Etienne Gilson, though not a Canadian, was one of the most influential Catholics in Canada in this century. He was born in Paris, France, in 1884. He completed graduate studies in philosophy at Paris and married in 1908. The family was blessed with three daughters and one son. Serving as an officer in the French army during the First World War, he was taken prisoner in 1916.

Though he had been nurtured on modern philosophy, Gilson turned through private study to Christian medieval thought. Adhering to the request of Pope Leo XIII, he published his early work on the philosophy of St. Thomas in the 1920s, a work which he would update frequently throughout his life. And, having achieved world-wide recognition by his teaching in university posts in Lille, Strasbourg, and Paris, in 1929, at the request of the Basilian Fathers at St. Michael's College, which was federated with the University of Toronto, he cooperated in the founding of a research institute which would later develop into the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Gilson remained as director of the Institute until his death in 1978, having taught there almost annually from its foundation until 1972.

Unfortunately, due to the high cost of graduate education, the Institute at present is not able to offer its full program of courses, and the teaching of Thomistic philosophy in particular has suffered due to the recent retirements or deaths of those mentioned earlier.

Professor Gilson, an exemplary Catholic, possibly the most renowned medievalist of his day, influenced hundreds of graduate students, many of whom teach philosophy today in the universities and colleges of the United States and Canada. His thrilling lectures were filled to overflowing. A list of his publications contains over twelve hundred articles and full-length books. There are so many influential books among them that it would be too arbitrary to mention some of them here and not others.

He was a senator in the French government for two years, and frequently represented France at international meetings, particularly those having to do with the founding of the United Nations and UNESCO. In 1946 he was made a member of the French Academy. His biography has been published by the Pontifical Institute (L. K. Shook, Etienne Gilson, 1984). What Gilson would have considered his highest honour came after his death. In September, 1998, Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Faith and Reason, praised Gilson by name for his Christian philosophy.

Achievement

Gilson's achievement was to bring to the modern world a new appreciation of the philosophy of the Middle Ages and of Thomistic philosophy in particular. He showed that medieval philosophy was not a monolithic structure but that it consisted of several very different philosophies. And he showed that, though these philosophies were influenced by religious belief, they were truly philosophy; that is, they were founded on principles available to human reason without revelation.

The influence of religious belief was indirect. It suggested new topics for investigation, it suggested new answers to old philosophical questions; but it left philosophy to deal with these suggestions according to its own methods. Every science uses other sciences to help it and is grateful for the assistance, though it must incorporate the findings of these other sciences into itself according to its own principles; philosophy is no different in its relation to revelation. It is this indirect use of Old and New Testament revelation which can make a philosophy truly Christian and enable it to escape the errors into which other philosophies have fallen.

Metaphysics

It was especially in his explanation of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas that Gilson contributed to the renewal asked for by Pope Leo XIII. And here it was the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics that was chiefly affected. The most basic metaphysical teaching of St. Thomas is that God is a pure act of being; in him nature and existence are identical. This explains the divine attributes such as necessity and eternity, and shows how God is infinite being and infinite goodness. This view of existence, which had been lost for most of the history of Thomism, is unique to it, and illumines not only metaphysics but also other branches of philosophy, such as the philosophy of knowledge and of the human person.

Importance of philosophy

The basis of our culture is what we believe about ultimate reality and the next life. Gilson was aware that society lives in accordance with its philosophy. And, at the end of the second millennium of Christianity, it is particularly fitting to mention a talk given by him entitled The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand, published by the Pontifical Institute in 1948. History tells us that, just before the year 1000, some frightening events were reported in Europe and people were very much afraid. Gilson stresses that, just before the year 2000, even more frightening events have taken place and that people should be much more afraid than were the Europeans of a thousand years ago. He mentions, for example, the World Wars, the Nazi and Bolshevik death camps, nuclear bombs, unbridled biological research, and particularly the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, which not only is permeating our civilization but is succeeding in this without everyone being aware of it.

Nietzsche declared that there is no God and that we must face up to that fact. And Gilson draws out the consequence for the human race if it accepts the final endpoint of the godlessness which is rapidly engulfing the Western World. He quotes from Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov: "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted." And we can see more clearly than Nietzsche, and now more clearly than Gilson, what will happen if atheism succeeds more thoroughly than it already has done. Without a divine guarantor of our freedom, we will have nothing to protect us from one another and from an enslaving state. Our existing democracies, such as they are, will be no protection. Already children in the womb have no protection. Children conceived in test tubes have none. It seems that soon the old and infirm will have none. And our governments and courts are siding with those who deprive so many people of their rights.

For Gilson, the only effective answer to Nietzsche is faith in God. And this faith, in practice, must be accompanied by a philosophy such as that of St. Thomas Aquinas, which shows that much of God's plan for us is written into our very nature, where we can find a basis for morality and the political order which is true for every human being.

Philosophy and education

In 1951, not long after the talk we have been reporting, Gilson gave an other talk, in Toronto, entitled The Breakdown of Morals, and Christian Education, which continued the lesson of the earlier talk. The first part of his thesis is that in the twentieth century we have witnessed in our society not a "breakdown of the mores, that is to say, of moral behaviour, but the breakdown of morality itself. The very idea that there is an objective distinction between good and evil, and that man, by consulting his reason, can tell with certitude what is right and what is wrong, is today publicly discussed, subjected to a sharp critique, and, as often as not, rejected as wholly deprived of rational justification. This is something entirely different from, and much more serious than, any temporary relaxation or loosening of moral laws themselves. This is the denial of the very existence of such laws. The real trouble with our own times is not the multiplication of sinners, it is the disappearance of sin."

For the past while we have been living on our moral capital, not on the interest from it. And what happens to capital used in this way is that it disappears. Referring to the denial of the existence of God and to the acceptance of our being left to our own decision and our own resources without the guidance of religion, Gilson says that "this is the most tremendous revolution that ever took place in world history."

The second part of Gilson's thesis is that our modern democracies (liberal States, as he calls them) accept pluralism in religion not only in the sense that no religion is favoured but also in the sense that no religious teaching at all is espoused, so that the government is entirely non-religious. These States accept religious faith as a private concern, not something affecting what happens in parliament or in the courts. Thus, when they take over education, which all of them do, at best they allow the teaching of religion as something private and unimportant, at worst they make no provision for it at all. (In the recent secularization of religious schools in Newfoundland and Quebec, we can see our Canadian governments' lack of concern for religion.) Now, when we put together the two parts of Gilson's thesis, we see that secular morality has no universal or solid foundation, and that liberal States are neutral or hostile towards religion, which is the only solid foundation for morality. We must then conclud e that the morality of a liberal State will not be an objective morality based on eternal truths but rather will be whatever parliaments say and courts decree. And we can be sure that such a morality will quickly become based first on majority opinion and then on the will of a dictatorial few.

"To sum up, the breakdown of morals is a matter of life or death for the liberal State. After heedlessly squandering the Christian heritage on which it has lived so long a time, the day is now come when it has to make a choice: either openly to draw from all the sources of religious life, and thus to survive, or else to let them dry up, and thus itself to perish."

Joseph Owens

Father Joseph Owens was born in Saint John, NB, in 1908. He became a member of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (usually called the Redemptorists, with the initials C.Ss.R.) in 1928, and was ordained a priest in 1933. He did parish work in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, graduate studies in Toronto at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and taught philosophy to younger members of his Community, until he received his Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies in 1946. He then continued to study at the Institute while also lecturing in philosophy in Redemptorist houses of study. In 1951 he received his Doctorate in Mediaeval Studies summa cum laude from the Institute. He continued to teach philosophy in Redemptorist institutions and became a professor of philosophy in the Pontifical Institute in 1954.

Father Owens taught philosophy and published books and articles on it at the Institute and in the University of Toronto for over forty years. He also gave numerous addresses to academic societies around the world. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and served as President of the Metaphysical Society, the Canadian Philosophical Association, the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association, which awarded him its Aquinas Medal.

Father Owens wrote nine philosophy books and almost a hundred and fifty articles and forty book reviews. Perhaps his two best-known books are The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background of Medieval Thought and A History of Ancient Western Thought. The former was first published in 1951, and was frequently revised and republished. The latter was published in 1959.

In 1998 Father Owens celebrated his ninetieth birthday, his seventieth year as a Redemptorist, and his sixty-fifth anniversary as a priest. Having passed the usual retirement age in 1973, he continued to publish and to teach (part-time) for another twenty-five years. As one may have guessed, his speciality was Greek philosophy and its influence on medieval philosophy.

In medieval philosophy he taught and wrote extensively on the philosophy of St. Thomas, especially in the areas of metaphysics (the study of ultimate reality), the philosophy of the human person, the philosophy of knowledge, and ethics. He made a deep impression on the hundreds of students whom he taught and the thousands of persons who read his books. He was certainly one of the great Thomists of our day.

State of Thomism today

The study of Thomism has waned once again, though there are still a few important centres of it throughout the world, and Pope John Paul II is just as much concerned about the situation as Pope Leo XIII was in his day. In 1979, the hundredth anniversary of Aeterni Patris, a new Center for Thomistic Studies was opened at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, by the Basilian Fathers, who had founded the Institute in Toronto, and Father Owens was one of the invited speakers on that occasion. His talk, "The Future of Thomistic Metaphysics," was published in One Hundred Years of Thomism. It is available from the Center at 3812 Montrose Blvd., Houston, TX 77006.

In this talk we find compelling reasons for Catholics to restore the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas in all Catholic seminaries and universities: "If important things need doing and can be done by the metaphysics of Aquinas better than by any other, there should be reasonable assurance that interest in his way of philosophizing will continue as long as those needs are felt. The incentive for promoting Thomistic metaphysics will be there."

What Aquinas does best

The first thing that St. Thomas can do better than others is to prove the existence of God and establish his attributes. "In Aquinas God is presented trenchantly in terms of existence. The things that confront us exist. Their existence is accidental and prior to them, showing that it comes from something else and ultimately from ... existence itself as subsistent, personal, all-knowing, all-powerful, provident to the smallest detail."

The second concerns the immortality of the human soul. "The human soul, because of its thinking in terms of universality and complete reflexion on itself, acts in a way that transcends material conditions. In consequence it has its existence in independence of the matter it informs."

The third concerns the existence of the physical world, ourselves, and other human beings. Many philosophers have been unable to convince themselves and others of this existence, but Aquinas's theory of knowledge shows that external objects are the cause of our knowledge of them and even of our self-knowledge, and thus their existence is prior to our knowledge.

The fourth concerns "the destiny of man, the purpose of human living." "The metaphysics of Aquinas explains tellingly on the level of human reason why the contemplation of God's essence, in accord with revealed doctrine, is what alone can fully satisfy human aspirations and can provide the ultimate goal for which a man should strive in every action."

In other words, the philosophy of Aquinas is true. "These are three outstanding areas that will continue in the future to need the metaphysics of Aquinas--God, soul, cognition. No other metaphysics yet developed will meet their needs so satisfactorily. Numerous similar needs may be catalogued as one goes through other areas in confrontation with Aquinas's philosophical thinking-moral reasoning, truth, goodness, freedom, divine presence, natural law, and so on."

Metaphysics is the basis of philosophy, and philosophy is necessary to Catholics who wish to have a rational defence of their faith in so far as the natural order allows. Father Owens has spent his life making this contribution to the Church.

Fr. Leonard Kennedy is a priest in the Congregation of St. Basil--C.S.B.--and himself the author of four books on medieval philosophy.

(1.) "The Secularization of Western Culture and the Catholic College and University," Current Issues in Catholic Higher Education (Summer, 1980) pp. 7-23.