TRUTH FOR ITS OWN SAKE
As an old man who has been a lifelong Catholic, I
am (I think understandably) depressed at the moment about the condition of the
Catholic Church, especially in America.
The factors that most of all make me unhappy are these two: (a) our many remarkably incompetent bishops,
and (b) our many homosexual priests and their “lavender mafia.” Based on my study of the history of the
Catholic Church, however, I am relatively confident that the Church will
eventually bounce back from this awful slump.
But the bounce-back probably won’t come for a long time, and, given my
age, it almost certainly won’t happen while I’m on earth to see it. I will die an unhappy man.
I look for consolations. One of them is that the Notre Dame Football
team – which is Catholicism’s official college football team (at least my
father, a devoted Catholic who never himself went to college, so considered it
when I was a boy) – is having a strong winning season. This, I take it, is a sign that God has not
abandoned his Church. I don’t go so far
as to think this means that God will allow Notre Dame to beat Alabama for the
national championship, for to do so he would have to disappoint many good
Evangelical Protestants in the state of Alabama; and as far as I can see the
Evangelicals of Alabama, despite their doctrinal deficiencies, have been in
recent times more faithful Christians than the Catholics of northern and
western states.
I also console myself with the thought that the
official teachings of the Church, despite the apparent wishes of some German
bishops, remain true to the teachings of the Apostles, the Fathers of the
Church, and the Doctors of the Church.
The Nicene Creed has not been openly repudiated.
And I especially console myself with the thought that
the theology of the Church has for many centuries borne a strongly Aristotelian
flavour. This is of course particularly
true of the theology of Thomas Aquinas (1225-74).
One of the great shortcomings of the modern era is
that we (and by “we” I mean the modern world in general) have repudiated
Aristotelianism, above all Aristotle’s concept of mind (or intellect or reason
– whatever you want to call it). We have
replaced it with what I suppose may be called the utilitarian concept of
intellect.
According to Aristotle (384–322 BC), the highest
purpose or function of intellect is to know truth. “All men by nature want to know,” he said in
the opening sentence of his Metaphysics.
According to the modern or utilitarian concept, the intellect is a tool
for doing or making. Aristotle held that
knowledge is an end-in-itself. We
moderns hold that knowledge is a means to a further end, an end that is more
valuable than knowledge itself.
The modern view was perhaps best summed up by Karl
Marx (1818-83) when he said in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point,
however, is to change it.” In the United
States, the thinker who did the most to explain and defend this modern view of
intellect was John Dewey (1859-1952) in his philosophy of Instrumentalism.
For Aristotle, the mind and the universe were made
for one another. Mind is a faculty that
has the potential for understanding the universe, and the universe is an entity
(or a system of entities) that has the potential for being understood by mind.
Mind reaches its fulfilment in understanding extra-mental reality, and the
universe reaches its fulfilment in being understood by mind. The wedding of the
two is the ultimate point of reality.
Not so for us moderns. For us, the intellect is a useful tool. And a marvellous tool it has been. Not only did it enable us to survive as a
species, as Charles Darwin (1809-82) pointed out; but in the last few centuries
it has, in its function as tool, done amazing things, godlike things. Our science-based technology has transformed
the world in a million ways, most of them (but not all) genuinely
beneficial. These transformations have
taken place not just directly in the obvious spheres (medicine, transportation,
communications) but indirectly in social spheres (economics, politics,
psychology, social equality, sexual relations).
This modern idea that knowledge should be pursued,
not for its own sake but for the sake of good things beyond knowledge, has even
benefited the pursuit of knowledge. In
the old pre-modern days, science was a plaything for super-smart people who
didn’t have to work for a living, people like Aristotle, Aquinas, Galileo, and
Newton. Ordinary people didn’t mind if
super-smart people liked having fun that way.
We were tolerant of harmless scientists. But once we figured out that
scientists were making discoveries that allowed engineers to create useful and
pleasant things, we decided to devote lots of money to science, private
philanthropic money and public taxpayer money – so as to multiply the number of
scientists and the number of useful discoveries.
But if I’m somebody who believes that truth is not
a thing of value for its own sake, then it will be quite logical for me to
conclude that lies are allowable provided these lies seem likely to produce
beneficial results. Soviet Russia and
Nazi Germany have been the most striking examples of that kind of “utilitarian”
lying.
We Americans have not been immune to this kind of
thing. Politics, of course, has always
been replete with lies, but I have the impression that it’s getting worse. Maybe I’m wrong; I hope so. But wherever I turn to national politics, no
matter which party I look at, I seem to see falsehood running wild.
That’s one of the reasons I hope Catholicism soon
recovers from its present corruption – so that the world will once again be
safe for at least a few Aristotelians, people who believe in truth for its own
sake.
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