“This

book is chock full of the wisdom of old age, like a fine wine. It is a
delightful journey of well-ordered ancient truths marching through the dark
forest of non-delightful and disordered modern falsehoods. It reveals the
catastrophic consequences of Protestant, Islamic, and secular-humanist
voluntarisms, which implicitly ‘play God’ by their reversal of the fundamental
relationship between the human mind and objective reality.”

— PETER KREEFT —
Professor of Philosophy, Boston College
Author of dozens of books, including Handbook
of Catholic Apologetics

“There are many books on the relation of faith and reason. Some of them are
trustworthy guides to the subject, some not. What Fr. Schall has produced here is
eminently trustworthy. He gives not only a sound picture of what it means to be
an intelligent Catholic on a vast range of topics, but with daring and accuracy he
identifies the erroneous paths most likely to lead an intelligent Catholic astray.”

— FR. JOSEPH W. KOTERSKI, S.J. —

Associate Professor of Philosophy,
Fordham University
Editor-in-Chief, International Philosophical
Quarterly

“Fr. James Schall’s latest book is a collection of his perennial thoughts

illustrating both his literary abilities and his deeply Catholic intellect. This set of
essays showcases what it might mean to place one’s intelligence in the service of
Christ.”

— TRACEY ROWLAND —
St. John Paul II Chair of Theology, University
of Notre Dame (Australia)
 LIVING FAITH

SERIES EDITOR: FR. DAVID VINCENT MECONI, S.J.

Fr. David Vincent Meconi, S.J., is a Jesuit priest and professor of theology at
Saint Louis University where he also serves as the Director of the Catholic
Studies Centre. He is the editor of Homiletic and Pastoral Review and has
published widely in the areas of Church history and Catholic culture. He holds
the pontifical license in Patristics from the University of Innsbruck in Austria,
and the D.Phil. in Ecclesiastical History from the University of Oxford.

ABOUT THE SERIES

The great Christian Tradition has always affirmed that the world in which we
live is a reflection of its divine source, a place perhaps torn apart by sin but still
charged with busy and bustling creatures disclosing the beautiful presence of
God. The Living Faith series consists of eminent Catholic authors who seek to
help Christians navigate their way in this world. How do we understand
objective truth in a culture insistent on relativism? How does one evangelize in a
world offended when invited to something higher? How do we understand sin
and salvation when so many have no real interest in becoming saints? The Living
Faith series will answer these and numerous other questions Christians have
today as they set out not only to live holy lives themselves, but to bring others to
the fullness of life in Christ Jesus.
 PUBLISHED OR FORTHCOMING

Imaginative Apologetics
Holly Ordway

The Family of God and How Christ Lives In His Church Today
Carl Olson

Jesus Christ in Islam and Christianity

Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J.

Holiness and Living the Sacramental Life

Fr. Philip-Michael Tangorra

The Joyful Mystery: Notes Toward a Green Thomism

Christopher J. Thompson

Spirituality of the Business World

Michael Naughton

Sanctity and Scripture

Scott Hahn

The Adventure of Christianity

Daniel Keating

Catholic and at College

Anne Carson Daly

Living Grace & Deadly Sin: A Guide to Getting Our Souls Straight
Fr. David Vincent Meconi, S.J.
CATHOLICISM
and
INTELLIGENCE
 CATHOLICISM
and
INTELLIGENCE

FR. JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.

Steubenville, Ohio
www.emmausroad.org
 Emmaus Road Publishing
1468 Parkview Circle
Steubenville, Ohio 43952

©2017 James V. Schall

All rights reserved. Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schall, James V., author.

Title: Catholicism and intelligence / Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
Description: Steubenville : Emmaus Road Pub., 2017. | Series: Living faith | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056276 (print) | LCCN 2017001997 (ebook) | ISBN
9781945125287 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781941447932 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781945125270 (E-
book)
Subjects: LCSH: Catholic Church--Doctrines. | Catholics--Intellectual life.
Classification: LCC BX1751.3 .S3634 2017 (print) | LCC BX1751.3 (ebook) | DDC
230/.2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056276

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from The Revised Standard
Version Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) Copyright © 2006 by
the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of
Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, copyright ©
2000, Libreria Editrice Vaticana--United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,
Washington, D.C.

Cover design and layout by Margaret Ryland

“Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings.”
—Hebrews 13:9

“There are only two kinds of men: righteous men who believe themselves
sinners; the rest, sinners, who believe themselves righteous.”
—Pascal, Pensées, §533

“All that has being also has truth. The truth of a being consists in its orientation
to a knowing mind. And this cognitive relationship between mind and reality is
actualized by the mind’s ‘having’ the essential form of the existing thing.
Therefore, the principle of the truth of all existing things means specifically this:
it belongs to the inherent nature of any existing thing that its essential form (by
which a thing is what it is) is actually or potentially ‘received’ by a knowing
self; and further that any thing’s essence, thus ‘received’, is actually or
potentially owned, even absorbed, by the knowing mind. All reality is actually or
potentially mind-related, insomuch as its intrinsic essence is actually or
potentially incorporated into the knowing mind.”
—Josef Pieper, Living the Truth, 1989, 37

“On Sunday, April 7, 1776, Easter-day, after having been at St. Paul’s Cathedral,
I came to Dr. Johnson, according to my usual custom. It seemed to me, that there
was something peculiarly mild and placid in his manner on this holy festival, the
commemoration of the most joyful event in the history of our world, the
resurrection of our Lord and Savior, who, having triumphed over death and the
grave, proclaimed immortality to mankind.”
—Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Oxford, 1931, II, 17

“Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of
philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if
left to themselves, common men would call common sense.”
—G. K. Chesterton,
St. Thomas Aquinas, Ch. 6, 135
“All this business of the crafts we’ve mentioned has the power to awaken the
best part of the soul and lead it upward to the study of the best among the things
that are.”
—Plato, The Republic, 532c
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Greatest Service

Chapter 1 “Why Do I Exist?” The Unavoidable Question

Chapter 2 On Thinking the Actual World Out of Existence

Chapter 3 The Central Point of Catholicism

Chapter 4 On Being Roman Catholic

Chapter 5 On What Replaces Christianity

Chapter 6 On the “Openness to the Whole of Reality”

Chapter 7 On Islam as the Alternative to Catholicism

Chapter 8 End-Times: “The Secret Hidden from the Universe”

Chapter 9 Ongoing Catholic Intelligence

Conclusion “Truth Comes by Conflict”

Appendix: On Reading and Catholic Intelligence: A Hopelessly Incomplete

Bibliography
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank the following editors and publishers for permission
to reprint previously published articles in slightly different form. All rights
reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Chapter 1, originally published as “‘Why Do I Exist?’ The Unavoidable

Wonderment,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review (July 27, 2015).

Chapter 2, originally published as “On Thinking the Actual World Out of

Existence,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review (July 20, 2013).

Chapter 3, originally as “The Point of Christianity,” Crisis Magazine (July 18,

2012).

Chapter 4, originally published as “On Being Roman Catholic: The Great

Intellectual Adventure of Our Time,” aleteia.org (November 1, 2014).

Chapter 5, originally published as “What Replaces Christianity,” Catholic World

Report (November 28, 2014).

Chapter 6, lecture originally delivered as “Aquinas Lecture: On ‘Openness to the

Whole of Reality,’” Notre Dame Seminary (January 31, 2014).

Chapter 8, originally published as “The End Times: The Secret Hidden From the
Universe,” Ignatius Insight.com (November 21, 2005).

Chapter 9, originally published as “On Sustainability,” The Catholic Thing

(April 28, 2015).
Appendix, originally published as “On Catholic Intelligence,” Crisis Magazine
(February 3, 2016).
 INTRODUCTION

THE GREATEST SERVICE

“We offer (these gifts) … for all those who, holding to the truth, hand on
the catholic and apostolic faith.”

—From the First (Roman) Canon of the Mass

“The single Rose / Is now the Garden / Where all loves end / Terminate
torment / Of love unsatisfied / The greater torment / Of love satisfied.”

—T. S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

When we think of what it is that we can do for others, we usually recall

practical things like the traditional corporal works of mercy, like giving a cup of
water to the thirsty or our cloak to the needy. We can even think of creating jobs.
Perhaps it is rather that we should pray for one another. We usually do not think
of giving a lottery ticket or a recording of a Bach cantata, even though, in its
way, either of these might turn out to be more valuable to a given person. The
poor also need some luck and more beauty than we normally think of bestowing
on them. Yet, we first must ask: “Why should we ‘do’ anything for anyone, poor
or rich, good or bad?” The very question brings us to the great divide between
care of ourselves and service to others, both of which seem to be, and are,
necessary.
We are solemnly instructed on airplanes, in cases of emergency, to put on
our own oxygen mask before we put any on others, even children. Is this
“selfish”? The fact is that, if we cannot function for lack of air, we can help no
one. Concern for ourselves and helping others, then, need not be in opposition to
each other. Indeed, at the outset of our lives, the notion of maternity itself, of
motherhood, implies that, unless someone, our mother, our father, took care of
us, we would be in no position ever to think of others at all. And our parents had
to learn just what it was that we needed before they could help us. Not all things
were helpful or good. We thus need to know what to do, choose to do it, and
then carry out what needs to be done.
Our first experience of ourselves is in the eyes of another. We are from the
beginning social beings. We learn to speak because others have spoken to us in
whatever our language. We are amazed that little Chinese children can speak
Chinese, or Finnish children Finnish, both languages almost impossible for us to
learn. Our lives are intertwined with the lives of others at every stage of their
span from conception and birth to death itself. Likewise, concern for others is
about their good, not merely our feeling good that we are doing something for
others. We ought not to do good for others unless we know what is in fact good
for them and whether our ministry to them is what is needed at the time. Service
implies intelligence.
Yet, the last thing we really want, as Aristotle implied in his discussion of
friendship, is to be someone else, not ourselves. The essence of our relation to
others is premised on the fact that we are unique and unrepeatable as what we
are. We cannot be and do not want to be someone else. Unless we know what we
are, we cannot know what someone or something else is. Paradoxically, the best
way to take care of ourselves is to take care of, deal justly and honorably with,
others—especially those of our own household. At first sight, each of us seems
pretty insignificant. It is calculated that some one hundred billion distinct human
beings have lived on this planet since men first appeared on it. We have no real
idea of how many human beings are left to come after us. But unless we have
some way to realize and ground the fact that each of these billions of persons
who have, do, or will live on this Earth is of transcendent importance because of
what each of these persons inherently is, we will look on individual human
persons as expendable, merely passing things.
St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the greatest service that we can offer our
neighbor is to know the truth, to speak the truth. This passage is parallel to that
of Plato which said that the worst thing we could have in our souls is a lie about
what is. It sometimes seems that those who help the poor and sick are given the
highest priority in the Gospels. Few dispute that service to the poor is a good of
the highest order. But suppose that we ask: “What is the greatest service that a
medical doctor can do for us?” The first answer is: “To know what medicine is
and how to apply it where it belongs.” It is a good thing to give a cup of drinking
water to a thirsty man, but only if we are sure that the water is not polluted. It is
a still greater thing to design, plan, and put into operation a fresh water system
that serves many cities and many purposes, including the quenching of thirst. For
example, the ancient Romans were famous for their vision of making fresh water
available, and so began the widespread institutionalization of the aqueduct
system (some of which is still functioning) and the care of entire populaces. In
other words, the greatest service is truth, not only the truths of “know how,” but
the truth of things, including human things. From this supposition, all other
services flow.
This book, entitled Catholicism and Intelligence, is based on two premises.
First, what is peculiar or distinct about Catholicism is this: what the faith holds is
intrinsically intelligible even if not always understood by given persons. And
second, intelligence has its own structure or form that is rooted in the principle
of contradiction—“Nothing can be and not be at the same time in the same
way.” “Intelligences” or understandings that maintain that everything is true
even if contradictory cannot stand. It follows that we live in a world in which
some things are not true, even though some valid point may be found in
everything that is not true. This seeing what is true within error is why the major
function of the human mind is to distinguish what is true from what is not true,
what is right from what is not right, what can be held from what cannot be held.
To respect the mind is to respect what is.
It is a good thing, at least for us human beings, that we live in a world in
which things can and do go wrong. Without this possibility, finite beings like
ourselves could not exist. This possibility that things may go wrong means that a
sensible case can usually be made for what is untrue or what is wrong. We can
support what is, in fact, wrong with reasons. We just do not take in the whole
picture. Were our world such that nothing was required of us—no use of our
own insights or judgments needed to sort things out—we would be more like
robots than real living beings whose own powers were serious and whose own
errors had consequences. In other words, this book defends the fact that God
created a world in which things could and often do go seriously wrong. It makes
this case, however, with the realization that evil itself can be responded to both
by more evil and by what is good.
Much of this book will be concerned with the consequences of our thoughts
and actions. But it is not a book that is based on a theory of consequentialism.
The truth of a thing does not come from its consequences. But its consequences
come from the truth or falsity found in its origin. There can be, moreover,
unintended consequences to our actions. This is in part what chance is about. We
can learn from accidents and unintended consequences. Tornados and blizzards
must be dealt with even if they have no direct human causes. Such response also
reveals our character or lack of it. But our most significant deeds are the result of
our intentioned actions. They are the results of what we have considered and
chosen to do. Our legal system ought to be based on the principle that we are
responsible for our free acts. Yet, we can, and sometimes do, choose to be
ignorant of something in order to claim that we did not intend to do it. But this is
mere sophistry.
We need to know what we think as well as what happens when we carry out
what we think. Our dignity depends on our affirming the relation between what
we know and intend to do and what we carry out into the world, to what happens
as a result. To deny this relation is to deny what we are. The root of much
philosophical determinism arises from the fact that we often cannot bear to admit
that many terrible results were likely consequences of our free choices. It is at
this point that we can either deny to ourselves the truth of what we did or accept
it and seek forgiveness or punishment or other means to requite the wrong.
This book is not a history of Catholic writers or thought over the centuries.
Such history needs to be known and, as I will indicate in the Appendix, is easily
available. What rather concerns us here is the effort to think within the ambience
of Catholicism. Accepting that it is not something other than it says that it is, is it
possible, in its light, to make sense of our lives, our world, and, yes, God? The
chapter titles themselves, I think, give some sense of how we approach things.
We need to reflect on the curious fact of our own existence: that we somehow
find ourselves in a world that is already there. It can be known. We need to
recognize what is distinctive about Roman Catholicism, what the alternatives to
it are about, and whether they make sense. The revelation that makes us
precisely Catholic needs to be seen in its intelligibility. It informs us of things
that are true but ones we could not figure out by ourselves. But once they are
spoken to us, once divine deeds occur among us, we can see their wisdom. The
purpose of Catholicism is not to confuse but to enlighten us so that we can live
as we ought to.
At the beginning of this book just before the Table of Contents, six citations
are found that, I hope, will convey the spirit in which this book lives. It is best to
have considered them before anything else in the book is read. That is why they
are the first things we see after the title, which itself tells us something. Indeed,
each of these citations circles around the core title, the relation of Catholicism to
intelligence. Thus the very first citation is from Hebrews. It warns us that we can
be “carried away” by “strange teachings.” We thus should not be overly
surprised if some are carried away. Most of us are at times so tempted. But the
passage also tells us that we are to know what is strange about strange doctrines.
In other words, we are to make an effort to understand what is opposed to
Catholicism and why people might hold to such oppositions.
Blaise Pascal (d. 1662) is a remarkable figure in the history of thought. He
did not allow us to ignore revelation. We are to seek to know what we can of it.
What he tells us here is a theme that will often come up in these pages. The “two
kinds of men,” the righteous men who know that they are also sinners and the
sinners who believe themselves to be righteous, enable us to see that there is, as
Aristotle also said, a moral component even in our ability, or perhaps our failure,
to recognize the truth of our being and situation.
Josef Pieper (d. 1997) is always a reliable—indeed inspired—guide to what
is. We are often told that truth cannot be known, that it does not exist, or that it
has no foundation in reality. Everything, however, is created both to be and to be
known. This relationship is why our very being is not complete without knowing
what is, including our very selves. Truth does not exist outside of a knowing
mind. The mind that each of us possesses with our very being is one that seeks to
know. This is the mind’s and, more properly, the human person’s perfection. We
are not complete unless we know what is not ourselves. What is not ourselves is
not complete until some knowing mind, many knowing minds, know it.
Samuel Johnson (d. 1784) is one of the greatest figures of our tradition. I cite
here a passage from Boswell’s account of meeting him for lunch on Easter after
the Services at St. Paul’s in London. Boswell tells us that Johnson is particularly
mild at Easter because he has reflected on what it means. Indeed, he calls Easter
“the most joyful day in the history of the world.” That is an extraordinary
statement, itself worth considerable reflection. The Resurrection is the
foundation of Catholicism. It affirms that Christ, who is indeed God and man in
the same person, rose from the dead and announced the Good News of salvation
to us. This pattern is one that each human life follows. It is the intelligibility of
this truth that provokes all thought grounded in revelation. Thus, Augustine
affirmed: “The resurrection of Christ was God’s supreme and wholly marvelous
work.”
 Perhaps the man most like Johnson in English letters is G. K. Chesterton.
Chesterton stood for the fact that revelation is not directed only to an elite but to
everyone. This affirmation means that anyone, by the way he thinks and lives,
can reject revelation. Many theories have been proposed in modern times to
explain reality and the purpose of man in it. The “strange doctrines” that we saw
in Hebrews in the first citation reappear here. The philosophical and theological
attempts to explain the world as if it were not real or as if revelation did not
happen within it are contrary to that common sense by which we know the
reality in which we exist.
Finally, we have Plato (d. 348 BC), who is obviously not a Catholic, having
lived some three hundred years before Christ. Yet, it is this Plato who, along
with his student Aristotle, best provided that common sense outlook whereby we
can more easily see how revelation is addressed to our intelligence. We are to
study the best things that are. It is this normal experience that leads us to wonder
whether we ourselves are made well and whether we have any responsibility for
ruling ourselves so. We are asked, indeed, to be virtuous and to reject what is
evil. And we cannot help but wonder whether the world itself is made well. If so,
who made it? We will see in most of these chapters that neither we ourselves nor
the world explains its own being, its own to be. Thus, if we search for the
meaning of what is, we have to ask ourselves whether we are also being
searched for.
Catholicism and intelligence belong together. Neither excludes the fact of
our finiteness in this world, nor of the evil and fallenness that we know happen
and have, seemingly, always happened among us since our recorded beginning.
What is most surprising about the revelation that we call Catholicism is the
passage from John in which we are told that the Word was made flesh and dwelt
amongst us. For in this brief sentence we have everything put together. This
includes Eliot’s poignant words that the most unsettling thing about us in this
life is that it is the satisfied loves, beginning in the flesh, that most beckon us to
the reality of what transcends us.
The most difficult thing men are asked to believe is not that God exists, but
that somehow God was present in this world, even present in it as a man, in a
definite time and place. This relatively brief presence of the Word in time was,
because of who He was, sufficient to reorder all of mankind toward what is, in
the instance of each person who ever actually existed, eternal life. The promise
of this eternal life explains why the world, as we know it, exists. Each of us who
has made our home within the world finds, sooner or later, that the home to
which we are finally directed transcends the world. In essence, this
understanding is how Catholicism and intelligence relate to each other.
 CHAPTER ONE

“WHY Do I EXIST?”:
THE UNAVOIDABLE WONDERMENT

“(Socrates) ‘Could anything great really come to pass in a short time?

And isn’t the time from childhood to old age short when compared to the
whole of time?’ (Glaucon) ‘It is a mere nothing.’ (Socrates) ‘Well, do
you think that an immortal being should be seriously concerned with that
short period rather than with the whole of time?’ (Glaucon) ‘I suppose
not, but what exactly do you mean by this?’ (Socrates) ‘Haven’t you
realized that our soul is immortal and never destroyed?’ He (Glaucon)
looked at me with wonder and said: ‘No, by god, I haven’t.’”

—Plato, The Republic, Book 7 (608C-D)

“They had journeyed thus far by the west-ways, for they had much to
speak of with Elrond and with Gandalf, and here they lingered still in
converse with their friends. Often, long after the hobbits were wrapped in
sleep, they would sit together under the stars, recalling the ages that were
gone and all their joys and labors in the world, or holding council,
concerning the days to come. If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little
would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that
he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now
lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth,
looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and
kindled as their thoughts went to and fro.”
 —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (Ace
Books), 288

I.
René Descartes, who is generally considered the founder of peculiarly modern
philosophy, searched for a starting point that everyone could agree on but no one
could logically doubt. He found this starting point in what is contained famously
in the phrase: “Cogito, ergo sum”—I think, therefore, I am. He began in doubt
and ended up with himself. Most people do not have to go through such an
elaborate and dubious mental exercise to arrive at the obviousness of their own
existence. That each of us exists and knows that he exists need not be proved
from something more clear. Nothing is clearer. The consequence of doubting our
senses and what is connected through them to the world is not the certainty that
“I am.” Rather, it is the lack of certainty in anything else but my “I.” I can only
receive what I allow myself to accept. Yet to receive new knowledge from what
is not myself is the adventure of being what I am.
But once we arrive, by whatever path, at the certainty of our own existence,
we still wonder. We wonder not just “Why am I the particular being I am?” but
“Why do I exist at all, whatever or whoever I am?” What seems most curious
about such questions is that they require our attention to their answers. To be
clueless about any explanation of our own existence seems like a form of
madness. No doubt, no mere human being can give a completely satisfactory
answer to such a question as, “Why do I exist at all?” Partial or incomplete
answers are not wholly satisfactory, but they can suggest why it might be well to
stick around to see if something more complete might be available to us.
In the 1907 novel, The Travels of Lao Ts’an, a rather manipulated marriage
with a pleasing young lady is arranged for the hero, Lao Ts’an. He is in part
tricked into agreeing to the marriage contract but, in fact, things work out. In
discussing how he should understand his situation, he finds a pair of red scrolls
on a table in the “Shrine of the Man in the Moon.” The Chinese characters on the
scroll read: “May all lovers under the sky achieve the married state; these things
are fixed in heaven: do not miss your mate.”1 These lines, in fact, are repeated as
the last lines of the novel. They are designed to explain to us how we are to look
at the events of our individual lives, however they happen, justly or not.
If we spell out the ideas implicit in these memorable lines, we see that lovers
and marriage are naturally related to each other as their end. They are fixed; they
are meant to be related. No one can rebel against what was meant to be. If he
could change what was meant to be, that change would just mean that the next
change was meant to be. Yet, it is implied that anyone can miss his mate. How is
this possible if his mate is fixed? We already see here in these Chinese
characters the problems of love, freedom, fidelity, providence, and fault. Can the
marriage of lovers be free and still be “fixed” in heaven? Is it possible for us to
reject or to miss what ought to be? And if we do miss it, is not that consequence
also fixed? But if it is not possible to miss our mate, what is the meaning of our
freedom? Indeed, what is the meaning of romance itself if we have nothing to do
with the drama of its accomplishment?
The web of our existence, it is implied, is greater than we know. Yet it is
precisely we who are contained within it. The cosmos has no independent power
of consciousness to look at us. When we look at this same cosmos, we seek to
articulate what we see, as if it made a difference to it that someone, not itself,
understands it. Indeed, a certain deliberate incompleteness seems to exist in the
universe, as if it is waiting for something to complete it. The hypothesis that the
cosmos, and all within it—including myself—exist by chance makes our
question, “Why do I exist?” seem senseless. But if chance were the real reason
why I exist, then it cannot be chance that caused the mind that asks the “Why?”
question. The mind itself has a place for chance; it is not by itself a product of
chance. It is a capacity, a power of the soul of an existing being.
Philosophers tell us that, to be human, certain abiding questions must be
asked and, insofar as possible, answered. A human being does not exist just to
exist as a kind of inert stone. Nor does he exist just to keep himself alive, like a
man named Herodicus in Plato’s Republic who spent his whole life just keeping
himself in training so that he would not be sick. In the end, he did nothing but
stay alive, which amounted to a rather useless life, as Plato saw it (Republic,
406A-B). Man exists to know what existence itself—what is, in all its variety—
means. And within the sphere of existence, he wants to know what his own
individual, personal existence is about. Even if it does not mean anything, he
wants to know that too, which implies that he knows that it means something.
When Socrates famously said in The Apology that “an unexamined life is not
worth living”2 he did not intend simply to unsettle us. Nor did he approve the
person who asks questions just to ask questions, a rather annoying habit. Endless
question-asking logically is just another form of skepticism or sophism,
something that Socrates hated more than anything else. The first of the valid
questions that we ask ourselves is this: “Why is there something, rather than
nothing?” The second follows: “Why is this thing not that thing?” These
questions, in turn, are based on the existence questions: “Do I exist?” “Does the
cosmos exist?” “Does God exist?” Can we even ask: “Does nothing ‘exist’?”
without being incoherent? We know that we exist, just as we know that our
particular corporeal existence is right now passing through a cycle of years that
will end at our death. Whether that end of the first death is final is what issues of
the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body are about.

II.
In Act I, Scene 4 of King Lear, Kent says: “This is nothing, Fool.” The Fool
replies: “Then ‘tis like the breath of an unfeed lawyer; you give me nothing for
it. Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?” Lear replies: “Why, no, boy.
Nothing can be made out of nothing.” This affirmation that “Nothing can be
made out of nothing” is what philosophers call a first principle. It is a
proposition, the truth of which is contained within the very understanding of its
terms—in this case, the “understanding” of “nothing.” If the proposition that
“Nothing can come from nothing” is true, then nothing can come from nothing.
If it is false to say that “Nothing (that is, no “something”) can come from
nothing,” then it must be true that if there is a something, it must come from
something, not nothing. That is, nothing can come from nothing. And logically,
if I exist, my being must be related to what always is. Any break between the
two existences, that is, existence itself and my existence, would mean that I do
not exist, which I know to be false.
Why do I bring up these rather abstruse considerations here? In an old
Peanuts cartoon, Linus, dragging his blanket behind him, walks down a road
with Charlie Brown. He explains to Charlie: “I don’t like to face problems head
on.” Charlie, puzzled, stops to look at him, as Linus goes on: “I think the best
way to solve problems is to avoid them.” He takes his stand: “This is a distinct
philosophy of mine.” In the final scene, Charlie has one of those “How-is-this-
possible?” looks on his face as Linus explains his philosophical reasoning: “No
problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from.”3
The notion of running away from our problems is an amusing one, as we
usually carry our problems with us wherever we go. Yet, spending all our time
primarily on ourselves is precisely what our lives ought not to be about. In late
medieval spirituality, one school of thought so worried about elements of self-
love in our desire for beatitude and God that it almost denied our very existence.
This sort of concern, the melding of the self into the all, is found in classic
Buddhism.
 Any notion of love that promotes absorbing the self into an other—be it the
beloved, the world, or the divine—rids itself of the problem by eliminating the
one who has the problem, namely the distinct person, the “I” who exists.
Aristotle, in a famous passage, remarked, in his commonsense way, that we
would not want to have all the goods and riches of the world if it involved
ourselves becoming someone else other than who we are. So again, “What am
I?” and “Why do I exist?”

III.
In 2015, The Washington Post reviewed a Chinese novel by Mo Yan called
Frog. This novel was considered for a Nobel prize. What interests me here is its
plot. A jilted Chinese midwife in revenge becomes a state agent. She is
employed in a position that systematically pursues pregnant women who already
have one child. In her career, she is responsible for 2,800 abortions.
Later, she reconsiders what she has been doing. She marries a sculptor. She
arranges to fashion tiny figurines of each aborted child that she dealt with. She
places the figurines in her home. If we recall that there have been some four
hundred million babies aborted in China and over a billion three hundred million
in the world since 1980, we have to reconsider the question of “Why do I exist?”
In one very real sense, each of us exists because we were not aborted. Moreover,
the aborted child can ask, or someone else asks for him, “Why do I exist?” A
human baby in the womb is not nothing. It already exists.
But this realistic answer, that I am already an existing being from my
conception, is not sufficient, as the symbolism of the figurines testifies. What
was aborted was not just nothing. It was a human life, one that had already
begun and held the potential for the same destiny as any other human life. Each
aborted baby was originally created for the same purpose as anyone who
managed to last four score years and ten after birth in this world. The difference
is not that the aborted baby was not a human being. The difference is simply that
this unborn person was not allowed to develop as babies are intended to develop.
There are also babies who die from natural causes, who are not executed by
some state midwife. Of all of these human children, we still ask the question
—“Why do I exist?” We ask this question of ourselves in the context of every
other individual member of the human race who has ever been conceived and
lived as human in this world.
How do we go about thinking of this series of questions? Or better, how do
we go about answering them? We can approach the question of “Why do I
exist?” from two angles. To be sure, we exist as the peculiar individuals we are
because of the relationship of our mother and father to each other. But this
answer, and it is a correct answer, just pushes the issue back to their parents and
on back to the existence of anyone at all in this world. We ask what do I figure
out about “Why I exist?” from our reason. We need also take into consideration
what is found in revelation. Having looked at both, we can perhaps make some
sensible answers to the question as asked.

IV.
When we think about these things, we first notice that we cannot begin to think
unless something else besides ourselves provokes or incites us to think at all. We
see a lake or a slice of bread or a cat. We want to know: “What is it?” We notice
that neither the lake, the bread, nor the cat asks itself: “What am I?” or “Why do
I exist?” It is we who ask these questions about them. How remarkable, really.
We also notice that I ask the question: “What is a cat?” In doing so, I
distinguish myself from the cat. And just because I know what a cat is and what
this particular cat looks and sounds like, I do not change the cat. What changes is
me. I find that I am more than myself when I know and think about what is not
myself, whatever it is. I realize that knowing the cat or lake or bread does not
limit me. It expands me. I can know all sorts of things that I am not. Indeed, as
Aristotle said, I have a power or capacity to know everything that is.
When I have accumulated many things known, I begin to wonder how they
all fit together. I also want to know why and how I am related to them. I do
notice that some of them I need just to keep myself alive. I need water and bread.
I have to figure out ways to obtain them, and to obtain them in drinkable or
edible condition. For this purpose, I usually have to depend on the help of others.
If I had to do everything myself, I could barely survive and then not for long. If I
drank poisoned water, I would not make it.
So I want to know whether any order is found in these things. “How do they
all fit together, if they do?” Strangely, with everything I encounter, it seems that
human beings are all in the same boat. The existence of other things is not fully
explained by themselves either. They come to be and cease from being, often in
a regular pattern. I notice that cats cause cats; human beings cause human
beings. But neither seems to be able to bring itself into existence. Each thing
apparently comes from what is already there and of its kind. Elephants do not
come from turtles.4
Thus, the answer to the question—“Why do I exist?”—involves the question:
“Why does anyone or anything exist?” And, because of the power of knowledge
in some, but not all, things, we want to know: “Whether what is not capable of
knowing is itself related to the purpose of the beings with the power of knowing
as part of their very nature?” Does the existence of the world also imply that, for
it to be complete, it ought itself to be known? This relationship would mean that
the knowers, in the fullness of their own existence, need to have time sufficient
to understand other things.
But if something is known, does not this fact imply a knower that is capable
of knowing all that is? Limited things imply a source that limits them. This
conclusion would mean that somehow the world includes a communication of
mind to mind, as well as an existence out of nothingness. Now, if I ask the
question—“Why do I exist?”—I suspect that the answer is: “So that I might
know what is not myself.” In so doing, I become aware of myself as knowing
what is not myself. So I begin naturally to wonder: “What is it all about?” Is
there a common origin or cause of all things that need not exist, including
myself?

V.
Now let me approach our question—“Why do I exist?”—from another angle:
from the angle of revelation. Let me say this about revelation. Some people will
maintain that it is myth, or madness, or of no “scientific” importance. So we do
not need to pay attention to any of its answers. But what if what it tells us about
the world, God, and ourselves has intelligibility about it? Each thing is what it is
and not something else. What if it all makes at least some sense? We cannot just
walk away from this information as if it is of no concern to us. It provokes us. It
questions the reasons that we might give to reject it.
Moreover, if we do find intelligibility in what is called revelation, does it
help us to think better about everything else? If it does, as it often does, this fact
probably indicates that some connection between our intelligence and the
intelligence that the universe implies makes some sense. Socrates tells us that
when he was a young man, he was concerned with the order of the world. He
found no satisfying answers. But one day he was in a bookstore in Athens. He
happened onto a book by Anaxagoras in which it said that the cause of the world
was not earth, air, fire, or water but “mind.” He was never the same after that,
and neither are we.
The assumption of revelation is that “mind,” the source of all intelligence
existing in the universe, is, if it so wishes, capable of communicating with any
mind, including the human mind. This view implies that the world is not itself
necessary. It did not need to exist, nor did anything in it, including ourselves,
need to exist. Thus, the question—“Why do I exist?”—would have to consider
the fact—if it is a fact—that a universe, with actual rational beings in it, has a
source.
Since no finite being caused its own existence but still exists, each person is
able at least to consider what revelation describes as the purpose of the existence
of each human person. This purpose, because of the peculiar makeup of a human
being with both body and soul, could involve both an inner-worldly purpose and
a transcendent purpose that would explain the destiny or salvation of each
individual person. Each person is one being, his own, nothing else.
To make my point, let me cite two passages from Scripture, one from Acts
and the other from the Gospel of John. In Acts, Peter is asked by the local rulers
to explain by what authority he is preaching and curing. He responds:

Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today

concerning a good deed done to a cripple, by what means this man has
been healed, be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by
the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God
raised from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well. This is
the stone which was rejected by you builders, but which has become the
corner stone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other
name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. (Acts
4:8–12)

What does this passage tell us? There is a salvation for each person from sin and
death, given in a definite way through Christ.
The second passage from John reads: “The Father loves the Son, and has
given all things into his hand. He who believes in the Son has eternal life; he
who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon
him” (Jn 3:35–36). What are we told here? We are told that each of us is to be
given “eternal life.” But it is given only on condition that we understand from
whence this gift comes. It also depends on our free acceptance of it and doing in
our lives what it instructs us to do.
Lacking these elements, not even God can help us. Could our destiny have
been achieved in some other way? Doubtfully, it might have been, but not so
perfectly. We are already involved in this way. We are, each of us, to participate
in the inner life of the Trinity through the Son’s redemption of our lot. This
death on the Cross followed because of our sins. Our sins attest to the
transcendent importance and destiny of each of us, whatever the record of our
sins.
Plato already worried in the Phaedo and the Republic that our crimes and
sins need to be both punished and forgiven. Plato, and Scripture, understood the
punishment part, but Plato did not know how the forgiveness part worked itself
out. He did understand that the one against whom we sin needs to forgive us.

VI.
Let me now conclude by answering the original question, that is: “Why do I
exist?” I exist to participate in eternal life, that is, the inner life of God as it is
made known to us. I can be enabled to participate in this inner life because of
what I initially am, a free and rational being. But also it is possible because I
have been offered a life beyond man’s natural capacities. God did not originally
intend that we die. He created us in a world wherein our existence depended on
others. Yet, He created us for Himself.
The effects of our virtues and vices are not isolated in a box affecting no one
but ourselves. They have their consequences, even if they are not intended—
indeed even if they are forgiven. The Chinese midwife, in repentance, carved the
figurines of the children that she aborted. Each human life, from conception to
natural death, has, as the end offered to it, “eternal life.” If we reject this gift, as
we can, we are left to ourselves. We will realize that what we missed was the
result of our own, not God’s, choice. We call this “missing” hell, and it has other
consequences.
The eternal life that each is promised is to be worked out in the actual history
of the time and place in which each person lives his finite life. The account of
how we lived is the drama of each actual life. No one can, in the end, be a friend
of God if he does not choose to be so. God had already chosen to love him. This
is why each person exists in the first place. This choosing is the condition of
friendship of all sorts, including that with God.
Nothing can come from nothing. And ultimately we cannot, as Linus’s
philosophy maintained, run away from all big and complicated problems,
especially the one that defines our final existence. Our destiny, our salvation, is
not just “fixed.” Rather, its fixing depends on us. Perhaps, with Glaucon, we are
surprised to learn that our souls are immortal. Perhaps, with Christ, we are even
more surprised about the resurrection of our bodies, that which finally makes us
whole in eternal life.
But as Gandalf and Elrond understood, we exist for conversation, for things
past and things future. We exist to abide with the cause of our being—something
rather than nothing. So if we ask, “Why do I exist?” we have two related
answers. One tells us that we are to know all that is. The second explains that we
are, if we choose it by the way we live and think, to be given eternal life. Both
are possible to us. Many answers are given to this question: “Why do I exist?”
None but this one, the one that combines reason and revelation in a coherent
whole, is so gladsome, so intelligent. The drama of our world is not fixed until
we fix it. We fix it by the way we respond to the truth that we can only love if
we have first been loved, as John’s letter tells us (1 Jn 4:19). To make that
response, in short, is why I exist.

1 The Travels of Lao Ts’an, trans. Harold Shadick (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), 194.
2 Plato, The Apology 38a5-6.
3 Reproduced in Robert Short, The Parables of Peanuts (New York: Harper, 1968), 53.
4 See James V. Schall, The Order of Things (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).
 CHAPTER TWO

ON THINKING THE ACTUAL WORLD

OUT OF EXISTENCE

“The scanty conceptions to which we can attain of celestial things give

us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all the knowledge of the
world in which we live; just as a half-glimpse of persons that we love is
more delightful than a leisurely view of other things, whatever their
number and dimensions.”

—Aristotle, Metaphysics, 644b33-645a1

“But it is rather natural to a man of learning and genius, to apply himself

chiefly to the study of writers who have more beauties than faults to be
displayed; for the duty of criticism is neither to deprecate, nor dignify by
partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it
may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever
she shall dictate.”

—Samuel Johnson, The Rambler,

Tuesday, February 5, 1751

I.
In the first chapter of this book, I wanted to make the basic point that we must
first ask about what is most obvious to us, namely our own existence. If I do not
know that I exist, then I do not know that you exist. And if neither of us exists,
we can stop worrying about anything further. On that hypothesis, neither of us
has much left to talk about. Nothing really matters. Two non-existing people
talking to one another about anything is probably as good a definition as we can
find of incoherence, if not silliness.
Any consideration of Catholicism and intelligence, however, operates on two
levels. Unlike other systems or religions, Catholicism, if it has any claim to our
attention, requires that what reason can figure out and what, if anything, is
revealed to us must stand in a coherent, non-contradictory relationship with each
other. Neither can be ignored. Both sources also must be adequately known on
their own terms. Thus, Catholicism claims to be an “intellectual” religion, one
that accepts, even fosters and cures, reason. It is also a “moral” religion and even
a “romantic” one, but these are not apart from reason. Intuition itself considers to
be the first act of the mind in knowing what is.
Earlier we saw how Descartes needed a contrived and methodic doubt to
“prove” his existence. There was, however, another side to Descartes. In order
for him to be assured that the world existed, he had to show that the world was
not the product of some diabolic presence deceiving him. He had to prove that
God existed and that He would not deceive him.1 For most of us, it seems more
plausible that what we see is really out there. We do not have to worry too much
about the devil deceiving us, at least on this score of whether things exist.
Descartes himself saw the world as a projection of what we could make. So he
really did not see the world but the laws in his head that he assumed explained
what is out there. He did not start from what is to work back to its causes and
understanding. Rather, he began within his own mind. What is out there is
merely a mental projection of what we think is there.
The title of this chapter is admittedly odd. Titles are meant to call our
attention to things that we might otherwise miss. The passages cited above from
Aristotle and Samuel Johnson manifest the direction to where this chapter will
lead. By the actual world I mean that which exists independently of man’s
thinking about what the world is or might be. Obviously, it is a paradox not to
begin with the only thing that incites us to think in the first place, namely, what
is out there, what is not ourselves.
In a sense, two worlds confront us: the world as it stands by itself and the
world as we think about it and explain it to ourselves. Usually these two worlds
clash only when what we think runs up against what is there. The usual result of
this confrontation of mind and being is that more than one “thought world”
exists. But no matter how many thought worlds we learn about, the world as it is
remains what it is. And the human mind can understand other thought worlds
that exist that are not his own or the one that he holds to be true. The initial
reference of thought is to the thing out there, to what is.

II.
Up until modern times, this latter realization that the thought world was
corrected by or measured by a real world was a barrier over which no sane
person could cross. Madness actually meant living in a thought world that did
not correspond to the real world. One way to eliminate the clash between
thought and things is to cease thinking. This logically meant a lapse into a
silence in which nothing could be said about anything. This silence is what
classical skepticism was about. It was voluntaristic in its origins. This was the
view that the world depends on will, not reason. Our presumed inability to trust
either our senses or our minds left us with nothing to say that mattered.
The other way is to eliminate the world, to postulate that no intelligibility,
even residual, can be found in it. Once we eliminate the world that is, with its
myriads of different things, we are left with Pascal’s vast emptiness of spaces
that frightens us. We replace or fill this emptiness with a world we fabricate
ourselves. To be sure, some classic philosophies denied that the world existed at
all or insisted that it was but another name for God. Modernity, however, usually
does not look on a world in despair as ancient thinkers often did. For the modern
mind, the world is open for human manipulation. Marxism, in particular, held
that the world must be forcefully cleansed of all ideas or beliefs, especially those
of nature, to assure that no reappearance of the gods would occur. The essential
step is to deny that nature has any intrinsic intelligibility or order, that it does not
have an origin.
Three related observations might be added here, one concerning ecology, one
concerning Islam, and one concerning Protestantism. Ecology is, in effect, a
theory of state control of the human race based on the supposition that the
purpose of man on earth is to keep himself going, as a species if not as an
individual, down the ages for as long as possible. This view assumes a
hypothetical knowledge of the total amount of physical resources available on
the planet.
On this basis, remaining world goods will be rationed or distributed to a
finite or ideal number of people allowed to live at a given time. Individual
human beings exist for the sake of the ongoing species whose corporate “good”
is the object of rule and existence. The purpose of thought, from this perspective,
is practical, namely, finding the means to keep the human race in existence for as
long as possible—a kind of inner-worldly immortality. In this view, the greatest
disaster would be to allow the disappearance of human beings from visibly
existing things. In the revelational tradition, however, this is what will happen to
the present race of human beings on this planet. This finite ending is how the
ultimate plan of God for the human race will be carried out to a new heaven and
earth.
Muslim thought, at least since the eleventh century, follows a voluntarist
metaphysics. That is, reality is based on the arbitrary will of Allah. Allah’s
nature is capable of doing all things imaginable, even contradictory things. His
power is not limited by the distinction of good and evil. Thus, man’s relation to
Allah was that of submission to whatever Allah might wish. If he told us to kill,
we should kill. If he told us not to kill, we should not kill. If he told us both, we
should do both. Our reason was not a check on Allah’s will. Since we could not
be sure that what we saw in the world could not also be its opposite, there was
no sense in investigating the world.
Once this view became dominant, science dried up in Islam. If there are no
stable secondary causes, science, and its quest to find through investigation what
is, cannot exist. Since Allah could make everything the opposite of what it was,
then it was blasphemy to think that things could not be the opposite of what they
were. From this voluntarist perspective our only alternative was submission. In
this sense, the objective world in any meaningful sense did not exist.
Faith’s rejection of reason also occurred when Martin Luther turned his back
on Aristotle and the great Greek philosophical tradition (famously naming
reason “the devil’s whore” which only opposed “faith alone”). Modern efforts to
show that Protestants and Catholics meant basically the same thing by sola fides
are helpful. Works needed faith to be salvific; faith that did not result in works
was sterile. Nonetheless, the denial of some connection between reason and
revelation, between Athens and Jerusalem, had its consequences. Atheism and
Protestantism agreed that no one could prove the existence of God from reason.
The result of this view was that we had one world empty of God and another one
full of God. The atheist said, in effect: “Fine, we will take the world.” The
Protestant said: “Take it, we will take God.”
The perplexed Catholic, who wanted to maintain both reason and revelation,
argued that revelation was addressed to reason. But reason had to be reason,
hence the importance of Aristotle, as Pope Benedict XVI showed in his
Regensburg Lecture. For the Catholic, the world’s order was not simply a void.
It manifested an intelligence that the human mind was designed to discover and
penetrate. Revelation was given to perfect reason by making clearer the inner
life of God with His endeavors to redeem the human race through the
Incarnation of the Son and the sending of the Spirit. In this sense, an intelligible
world, with a race of intelligent beings within it, meets the original Logos in
such a manner as to complete the purpose of the existence of both the world and
man, whose purpose points to the origin of both man and cosmos.

III.
Technically, the world about which (and in which) we think should correspond
to the world that is out there. That, after all, is what the classical definition of
truth is intended to mean. Truth is the conformity of mind and reality. What the
mind comes to hold is what is there, but after the manner of the knower’s own
faculty. This faculty is not and cannot be simply another type of matter for it to
do what it does—that is, remain itself and, at the same time, become the other.
For a proposition to be true, we mean that our thought of something is, and we
know that it is, formed by and checked by what is actually out there. But what is
there manifests its own intelligibility.
The so-called epistemological problem—“How do I know anything is out
there?”—cannot be solved by some proof that would be clearer than the ordinary
evidence we have of our senses and mind. This is why the great French Thomist
Etienne Gilson (d. 1978) said that, in the beginning, we simply must affirm that
“There are things and I know them.” The best we can do about any denial of this
relation between mind and things is to show the incoherence of any alternate
explanation. What things are is revealed in what they do. What they do or cannot
do also reveals what they are not.
Initially, the mind, not the world, is a tabula rasa, an empty slate. It becomes
attentive, curious, when the knowing person runs into things not himself. He
begins to separate things. “Wait a minute!” he realizes. “This thing is this thing,
not that thing.” The world is filled with numberless things waiting, as it were, to
be known once they exist and we come across them. The human mind does not
cause them to be, nor does it put in them the intelligibility that it finds in things.
It merely discovers that “this thingness” with its “whatness” is already there.
With our minds, we then seek to know what is. We name things, relate them to
each other, and gradually learn more about them.
Different languages have different words for the same things. Dictionaries
exist both to tell us what words mean and what words are used by different
languages for the things that we are interested in learning about. This situation
implies, however, that the cosmos itself stands, as it were, between mind and
mind, between the human mind and the mind that caused things to be what they
are. We speak of cause because we recognize that something does not come
from nothing. Nor does it come in just any old way. The existing things we
know do not keep themselves in existence. Even the one who commits suicide
does not eliminate his final existence but decides what it is to be. Wherever there
is being there is intelligence.
What I want to argue here basically is this: The reality of the world should be
and is inspiring and awesome. Human intelligence is the conscious discovering
and appreciating of what is. Truth only actively exists when a knowing subject
actively knows what is not itself. But this world, usually not without fault, can
become morally unbearable to many men. They choose not to live according to
reason, according to the truth and intelligibility found in the existing world,
including that found in themselves, in their own very structure. Men are the only
beings in the cosmos that knowingly look out on this same world from within it
and from within themselves, yet they are not different from the world in the
sense that what they are itself belongs to, originates in, the same reality that
made everything to be what it is in the first place. No man made himself to be
man, to fabricate by himself what it is to be man. In every case, he discovers
what is already there as man. Yet, we live in the first generation of men who
actually or implicitly propose to replace by their own ideas every aspect of the
what it is to be man found in nature.

IV.
We live in a world within which some human beings are dissatisfied because it is
as it is. This fact indicates that a free and intelligent creature is capable of
denying what he is. Understanding what he himself is turns out to be itself an
ethical imperative. He thus may, but need not, rebel against the being that is
given to him as a gift, as in fact something better than he could himself imagine.
Man does not cause himself to be or to be what he is in the first place. To think
the actual world out of existence, then, refers to the philosophic steps whereby
what is ceases to be the measure of the human mind. What is, thus, is replaced
by what I will the world to be. Or to put it another way, on this hypothesis, the
only “mind” found in the universe is the human mind, logically my mind.
But this new mind, conceived as independent of things, is in the strange
position of not having anything, even itself, as a solid foundation for what it is.
A human mind unrelated to any actual thing can thus always be otherwise,
something else. No real reason exists why it thinks this way rather than that way
since it has no objective grounding subject to investigation by others. This not-
having-a-definite-form is why it can always be otherwise, why the reality the
mind knows by itself is never there without sheer power forcing it to say that it is
there, whether it is there or not. In the end, this situation turns out to be but
another form of voluntarism, of will unrelated to intellect.
Yet, no one will admit that what he does is not really right or valid or true
even if its truth can contradict itself. Thus, instead of correcting himself so that
he returns to the reason in things as the criterion or measure of his mind, the
modern atheist or relativist thinks the world itself out of existence. It is too much
of a threat to the way he wants to live. He denies, in effect, that anything out
there measures his own mind or the actions that flow from it. He accomplishes
this elimination in the only way he can do it: that is, by an act of the will. Once
he has decided to go in this direction, he is, in this view, free to create his own
world.
In this newly constructed world of man’s own mind, he is not bound by
reality, by what is. He is only concerned with the configurations of the world in
which he wants (or thinks he wants) to live. In effect, he has exchanged truth
(the conformity of mind with reality) for artistic truth (the conformity of what
we intend to make with what we put out there). The world then becomes the
conformity, not of man’s mind with reality, but of reality to man’s mind. This
result is the basis of the general understanding of “freedom” in the modern
world. Man is not bound by anything but his own mind, not even by his own
body. His own mind is free to configure the world in any way that he wills. It is
not truth, what is, that makes us free. Freedom makes us whatever we want to
be, whatever it is.

V.
Atheism in the ancient world was largely a product of fear, in particular, the fear
of the gods. The classical religious myths told stories of the gods fighting with
one another, of their envy of man, and of their arbitrary punishment of him.
Likewise, the gods lived carelessly and whimsically. The good were often
punished in the stories, while the bad were rewarded. The gods, in other words,
were unfair. But why be fair if it meant nothing and had no consequences?
Plato’s brothers in the Republic thus wanted to hear justice praised whether or
not reward or punishment followed for living or not living rightly.
One way to escape this understanding of the world was to deny the validity
of the gods of the city that embodied and preserved all these aberrations in the
civic liturgies. A good and a justice higher than the city existed. The philosopher
was more authentic than the politicians or the priests. In fact, the philosopher
judged the city that rejected him. The crimes that were not punished in the city
would be requited in the rivers of Tartarus. The soul was immortal. No one could
escape his crimes without forgiveness and punishment. The world was not
created in injustice as it seemed just from looking at the ways men lived in any
existing city. This proposal of judgment and punishment after death was Plato’s
philosophic solution that saved the world from being a massive sea of injustices.
But the classical atheists, like Epicurus and Democritus, did not accept this
philosophical alternative either. The ancient atheists, unlike the modern ones,
were anti-city. They found what contentment they could find not by being social
but by withdrawing from every city. They preferred a garden. There they could
keep all such disturbing thoughts like sin or fault out of their hearing. If stories
of gods and philosophers always ended up in causing worry, then ignore or deny
both. Be happy in a very quiet and pleasant way. Yes, “Eat, drink, and be
merry,” but in moderation as too much of even these pleasures could upset us.
Human happiness could not care about the cosmos or the city. What went on in
them only upset us if we worried about them in relation to our lives and conduct.
Peace of mind depended on disregarding everything but what was immediately
at hand.
Modern atheism did not therefore think it could ignore the world, especially
a created world that somehow expressed or reflected a creative mind that was
not of the world. No one could deny that the world seemed to betray some kind
of intelligible order. That is why the Greeks called it a cosmos and not a chaos.
The trouble with this approach, particularly with its Christian origins, was that
we can imagine a world coming from nothing. Indeed, the Creed itself implied
that the world was created ex nihilo, from nothing. In this sense, believers
themselves had to think the world out of existence even to appreciate what it
was.

VI.
Once we understand that the world is not, in fact, itself everlasting, we can also
postulate that everything evolved by chance. Even things that seemed always to
appear in a definite order or sequence could supposedly be said to be caused by
chance. This approach seemed perhaps plausible up until scientists recently
began to notice that the world seems to have had a finite temporal origin.
Estimates were developed based on several approaches that the cosmos is some
thirteen to fourteen billion years old. Moreover, such estimates were made
because the cosmos manifested certain constants within an order. All of these
stable constants seem to have been operative from the beginning. What has
happened seems more like an unfolding of what is already there than chance,
though what chance there was seemed part of the same order.
If the universe has a beginning and manifests an order, it must logically
follow that this order arises from outside the universe itself. In other words,
before the beginning was nothing of the universe itself. But from this nothing, it
does not follow that an intelligent, infinite source did not exist. Rather it implies
that such a source did exist and was not itself part of the universe. There seemed
to be a cause that remained itself even while something besides itself came to
exist. Reflection on such data suggests that the universe manifests an intelligible
order that could not have been put there by the universe itself. The sidereal
objects—the stars, the moons, the planets, the galaxies, or whatever—are not
themselves intelligent creatures. They are not gods. What they seem to do is
make the existence of intelligent creatures within the world plausible.
But the intellectual creatures we know do not create their own intelligence. It
is already there as part of the same order that brought the whole cosmos into
being in the first place. Plato already understood some of this when he remarked
that the world would not be complete unless there were within it beings who
could look on it and praise it for its existing order. We see the same notion in the
Psalms and other philosophic sources. We might call it the problem or purpose
of finite intelligence. And clearly, if there is intelligence within the universe, that
is, beings who can examine and understand what they see, it follows that the
purpose of finite intelligence is itself to discover, and indeed acknowledge, the
order of the universe and its origins.
But once we begin to think of a finite origin to this cosmos, we cannot avoid
thinking of its end. Is it to go on forever in the condition that it is in, as modern
ecologists seem to think? The same calculations that posit the age of the various
kinds of stars in the universe also project their ceasing to exist or collapsing into
themselves. Some hypotheses, to avoid the creation issue, maintain that it all just
starts over again to repeat the same cycles. Such notions are not unlike the
reincarnation theories we see in several other religions. But we have no evidence
of this restarting, nor any reason why it might happen short of speculations on
the purpose of man in the universe. Cyclic reincarnation theories were usually
designed as a means for man finally to choose what is right in some distant cycle
so that he would not be condemned to meaninglessness.
A more pressing issue arises once we examine the arguments for the
immortality of the soul, and even more so, for the resurrection of the body,
which, in some sense, presupposes the immortality of the soul for it to be
possible. It would seem, then, that the purpose of the universe is related to the
finite intelligence manifested in the universe itself. Intelligence as such is open
to finite intelligence and the extra-cosmic intelligence we must postulate to
explain the order in the universe itself. What revelation adds to these
considerations is, at bottom, the reason why the two levels of intelligence exist.
Revelation maintains that the origin of the universe is not in the universe
itself but lies within the Godhead, in the free Trinitarian decision to bring other
beings into existence that could freely, if they so chose, participate in the inner
life of the Godhead. This inner life was not natural to beings other than God.
This fact meant that intelligent beings that were not God could only receive this
divine life if it also received the power to do so. But this possibility was what
was offered to those finite intelligent beings who found themselves existing in
the actual universe. The drama of human existence that we know as salvation
and redemption is but the carrying out of this purpose to associate man with this
inner life. The world is essentially the arena in which this interplay between God
and man is carried out. Its essence is the offering, acceptance, or rejection of the
kind of love that is found within the Godhead as its own reality.
In conclusion, what we do when we think the world out of existence in order
to set up our own world is freely to turn down the kind of beings that we were
intended to be. The finite human persons were not only to know and praise the
world, but, in due order, to participate, if they chose, in the inner life of the
Godhead. The logic of modernity, if I might call it that, saw that no compromise
was possible whereby we could retain God and still do whatever we wanted.
The latter choice required the evaporation of the world itself as the only sure
way to guarantee our not being subject to an intelligence within the world and its
origins outside the world. The irony today is that fortunately or unfortunately all
the evidence seems to indicate that no alternate world that we postulate is
superior to the one that is. In the end, a better world was in fact brought into
existence than any world we could propose for ourselves. In seeking to create a
better this-world without God, we usually end up, as Benedict XVI said in Spe
Salvi, by creating our own hells on earth.
1 See James V. Schall, “Cartesianism and Political Theory,” The Review of Politics, 24
(April 1962): 260–82.
 CHAPTER THREE

THE CENTRAL POINT OF CATHOLICISM

“In one fundamental sense, however, it seems to me that Christianity

alone attacks the seat of evil in the kind of world we have been
considering, and has a solvent for the intellectual predicaments which
arise in such a world. It addresses itself precisely to that crust of self-
righteousness, which, by the nature of its teaching, it has to dissolve
before it can do anything else with a man.”

—Herbert Butterfield,
Christianity and History1

I.
In the previous two chapters, we touch on a recurring question: Why is it so
difficult to figure things out and to live rightly in this world? Why is it not
enough to know that things often seem out of joint or inexplicable? Not to know
such things is itself a form of deliberate blindness. We must at least seek some
minimal but adequate understanding of this difficulty. We expect that
Catholicism, which claims intelligence as essential to its truth, will have
addressed this issue. Indeed, something seems wrong from the very beginning of
human life on this planet. There has never been much doubt of this fact in any
human tradition, certainly not in the one that Christians receive from the history
of Israel.
Usually, this perennial fault that hinders human existence is described as
original sin. It means at least this: we are born into a world that everywhere
contains the consequences of myriads of sins throughout history, in every local
context, indeed in every person’s life. Evidently the world is so made that our
aberrations as well as our worthy deeds are left to take their course in time.
Watching, recording, and evaluating this course is what the study of history is all
about—the wars and rumors of war, the great deeds, the corruption, the heroism,
the ordinary. It is the record of what we do with our actual lives. Our everyday
existence is a constant readjustment, both to ourselves and to others, of our faults
and our virtuous actions. If these consequences of our choices and deeds did not
in some way appear in our daily lives, it would mean that we were beings whose
deeds had no consequences or effects in reality. We would all be set apart and
isolated from one another, which is clearly not the case.
This reflection leaves us wondering about whether from evil deeds
something good is not also in some manner to be discovered. This possibility is
certainly an element in the classical discussion of evil. Evil is not “being,” but
the lack of a good that ought to be in something real. Moral evil is the lack of
some good choice that we refuse in our own actions. But we cannot do anything
evil unless it be present in some good. So while evil is not itself a source of
good, the good in which it exists provides the possibility of bringing other goods
from our evil deeds. This understanding is why we need not despair at the extent
and frequency of evil in our own lives or in those of others.
The presence of evil in the world—and there is evil in the world—is not a
sufficient reason to argue that all is lost. Evil is a cause of despair only for those
who refuse to understand what it is, its source, and its relation to freedom and
knowledge. Would it have been better that there were no world at all in
preference to a good world in which some evil not only is possible, but happens
quite regularly? One needs to be careful how he answers this question. Many
actual human lives, in fact, do exist in the world as a result of sin or were
conditioned by its reality in their lives. We are not asked to save ourselves in a
perfect world, but in a very imperfect one. This is not unfair, but it is not easy
either. The central point of Catholicism is that our salvation, that is, achieving
our transcendent end, is still possible in this very world that is itself good. How
we confront this possibility constitutes the drama of each of our actual lives.
Even the most optimistic or progressive utopian recognizes that he must deal
with the fact that things do not often work out so well either for each of us
singularly or for our group, nation, era, and world. Some people, to be sure,
think religion itself, especially Christianity, is the problem. Others see social
structures to be the culprit. Still others, psychologists and psychiatrists, want to
look into our souls for explanations. We even find those who think that evil or
the world itself is an illusion so they do not have to face the issue of evil and
their relation to it and its origins.

II.
We frequently overestimate our capacity to manage our disorders. We
underestimate their dire effects. We misjudge the forces that stand against what
is good. Faced with this condition, we begin to suspect that there must be some
truth in what St. Paul said: that our struggles are not so much against flesh and
blood but against principalities and powers. Still, it is more than human to want
to put the blame anywhere but where it belongs; that is, in ourselves, in the
intelligence-related freedom that constitutes the distinguishing aspect of our very
being, which is itself good and intended to be.
The characteristic of the modern age—which has an element of truth in it—is
the view that, since truth is relative, men ought first to concentrate on themselves
and what they can do and want to do with their lives. They refuse to grant a
presence outside of themselves calling to them to be what they are. This
exclusive attention to our individual lives is said to be what life is about. No
doubt, as we have seen, we do have a responsibility to know what we can about
ourselves, about our own lives. The Socratic “know thyself,” along with
Aristotle’s ethics, remains a fundamental first step in every life. But we should
not forget to look at the very physical structure of our bodies and how
extraordinary we are, as Leon Kass pointed out in his remarkable book The
Hungry Soul.2
But what if we maintain that no outside source by right can be postulated as
a guide to command or advise us about what we are? We then claim that man is
wholly autonomous. He is only what he makes himself to be, whatever it is. He
does not make or rule himself into what he ought to be. The word “ought” has no
meaning in a self-defined world except to justify our doing whatever we choose.
Ought implies an alienation in such a world. It indicates that what we ought to be
contains a standard to which we freely ought to aspire, even if we refuse to do
so. The refusing to do so is what essentially constitutes moral disorder.
The world, meantime, is full of a benevolence or charity gone wrong. We are
“kind” to animals but not to preborn human babies. The world is said to be
progressing. But, there are still too many poor people in it. It is cruel. Therefore,
we should take every step we can to eliminate poverty. But this at first sight
laudable endeavor turns out to mean, often, the elimination of the poor
themselves. We need to prevent them from reproducing or prospering. It is said
to be unjust to allow the poor or weak to exist. It hurts the environment to
support them. Kindness thus consists in lessening their numbers, especially in
encouraging them to be agents of their own elimination. Abortion, sterilization,
and birth control policies are encouraged and put into effect. China is almost a
visible result of this policy with its massive coerced abortions, sterilizations, and
its killing of girl babies in particular. The planet, it is said, cannot support very
many people, though we are hard pressed to know why not.
Yet, everyone wants to create a world in which all people are taken care of,
preferably by themselves. This inner-worldly goal justifies human existence, not
some transcendent purpose. Most people, however, become the objects of our
care. They are not the ones who provide for their own lives. We want to “cause”
others to be complete. This concern for others makes our existence seem noble.
We are against poverty, inequality, and especially discrimination. We want
equality of outcomes no matter what our talents or virtues. As Robert Cardinal
Sarah put it, “The myth of equality resulted in a bloody dictatorship [in Russia
and Guinea]. God willed that human beings should be complementary so as to
aid and support one another mutually. Equality is not God’s creation. …
Egalitarianism is an ideology that thrives when religion is forgotten.”3 We are
leery of excellence. Fame and fortune should be equally distributed. Our vision
of equality verges into uniformity, all the time insisting that every culture has its
place no matter how different or antagonistic it is to classic understandings of
what man is.
The function of our public life is to make these ideal things happen, however
incompatible they are with human reality. We are free only by assenting to our
own laws. We formulate an image of man as we want him to be, not as he is
created to be. The notion that authority is a “service of others” includes
remaking others, even medically, so that they will be happy with what we allow
them to be. We bring forth children in all sorts of ways in the oddest familial
arrangements, or lack thereof. We seldom ask first “What is the good of the
child?” or “Who is responsible for it?” Children are incidental effects of our
autonomy, not beloved purposes begotten from our nature. We, nonetheless,
expect everyone to acknowledge our benevolence. Everyone is blessed by the
exercise of rights bestowed on them, including the right to prevent children from
being born into this world.

III.
Herbert Butterfield, as we saw above, has reflected well on what interferes most
with well-being in this world. He recognized that Christianity had a response to
this question insofar as it could be located. This answer is not just out there
somewhere, in some theory or institution that can refashion us so that everything
will automatically be what it should be. At first sight, it seems odd to maintain
that “self-justification” or “self-righteousness” is the principal problem. We are
supposed to justify what we do; that is, we need to give a coherent and correct
explanation of our actions.
At first sight, something more grandiose than the condition of our own souls
is the problem. But Butterfield was right. The ultimate location is right within us,
among you. It is not just an idea or imagination. This fact is why Plato and
Aristotle located the source of political disorder in a disorder of the souls of
citizens. Powers and principalities themselves struggle over one soul. Original
sin is something already present in our lives with which we must deal. And its
presence is largely concerned with whether we are self-justified or whether we
are saved and willing to accept the fact that we do not depend only on ourselves
for the deepest things.
Christians have long wondered about the divine intervention that we call the
Incarnation, the Word made flesh. Its reality is located at the center of
Christianity. Basically, this term means that God, through a free action of His
own, instructed by word and example what it was that He had in mind for the
human race as a whole and for each person conceived, born, and died within it.
By all standards, this particular manner in which God revealed Himself to us was
unexpected, astonishing, and even provocative. Also, it was apparently quite
inefficient, as this divine initiative still is not, as far as we can see, even close to
preaching the Good News to all nations that Christ is Lord.
Surely, Christ would have won more folks over had He come in more glory
and power, more drama. People respect such things. We should not second-guess
the Lord, I know, but the plan of redemption was surely, to say the least,
inefficient for its given purpose. Most Jews rejected it from the beginning, while
the Gentiles who took it up spent much of their time fighting with each other
about what it meant. Many nations that once called themselves Christian are
busy giving Christianity up. Christians themselves find that the rulers of the
nations more and more require things, words and deeds, that they cannot accept
and still be Christian. Many become secularists or Muslims or adopt some other
explanation of reality that does not entail what Christ taught.
But, of course, in thinking of this situation, we must begin with the question
of whether our personal plan for the world is exactly the same as the one that
was found in revelation. Just what was the purpose of the Incarnation, of the
Word becoming flesh? Was it about reorganizing the world so that it would be a
decent place for us to pass through during our four score years and ten? Why did
Christ not seem to be too concerned about explaining how we might promote
economic development or harmony amongst the varieties of folks who live and
love on this planet? About the only passage in the New Testament that has
anything to do with international relations is that in which Christ sent the
Apostles forth to baptize and teach all nations. Many passages in the New
Testament suggest that, in the end of time, few will accept the revelation that
God wanted us to know about.
To be sure, Christ did give us some good advice, and if we followed it we
probably would be much better off. He reiterated the Commandments for one
thing. Then He added that if we even think of violating them, we are in sin. He
had little to say about politics and economics, art and letters. He was not a
revolutionary either. He just did not think that inner-world reorganization was
His purpose. We could figure these intermediate things out for ourselves if we
wanted to. Many a critic has wondered why Christ’s walking around Palestine
for a couple of years was all the time and exposure that the Father thought we
needed to learn what we needed from His Son for our salvation. It takes three
times that long to obtain a doctorate these days. Presidents and senators, let
alone judges, serve for longer periods of time.
It is not that Christ did not have a lot to say. We do not have it all. But we do
have enough for God’s purposes to be carried out. Surely should not Christ have
been more concerned with social and political structures, with freeing the slaves,
and with the eradication of poverty? He did say, in a passage we often forget,
that the poor would always be with us while we go about trying to eradicate
poverty (Mt 26:11). And many kinds of poverty can be detected, including
intellectual poverty. Christ talked a good deal about the world. He created it and
saw that it was good. Yet, the same world could be a danger to us. We could and
often did put it in the place of God. The world without God has become our
playground.

IV.
Recently, I came across the following astonishing passage of Karl Rahner, from
his book on the Spiritual Exercises.
 Christ passes up marriage, art, and even friendship, for the men He
gathered around Him do not really understand Him, so that He really
remained very much alone. He does not pursue politics or science. He
does not solve any of the social problems of His time. He showed no
resentment towards those things. He did not despise them. He just did not
busy Himself with them. The only thing we can really say about Jesus is
that He was a very pious man.4

Such a passage gives us much to think about. It may be one of the most counter-
cultural passages we will ever see.
Like Socrates, Christ never wrote a book. He seems to have enjoyed
children, flowers, and ordinary things. Yet, Christ was not particularly concerned
about this life but rather about our eternal life. If we missed out on that end,
nothing else much mattered. We are so much immersed in social activism and
the things of this world that we do not recognize the central point of Christianity.
We were not primarily created for this world, but only in it for a relatively short
space of time, enough time, no matter what polity or era we live in, to decide for
ourselves whether or not we will accept the purpose for which we are created.
This is the primary thing that revelation had to tell us. Thus, Paul can begin his
letter to Titus in this way: “Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ,
to further the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth which accords
with godliness, in hope of eternal life with God, who never lies, promised ages
ago …” (Tit 1:1–2). Most everything is already there.
If we look at the four reasons why Aquinas said that a divine law or
revelation was necessary (that is, understandable), we will notice that each of
these four reasons (ST I-II, q. 91, a. 4) was designed to clarify something about
eternal life. The first was that we needed a clearer idea of God—our end—than
what we could figure out by ourselves, even though we should figure out what
we can simply to recognize the power of mind we do have. The second was that
we could use more order in our inner thoughts in order that we could observe the
external laws better. Thirdly, we could use a clearer understanding of what sins
are. And finally we should take seriously the teaching that Plato also understood
of eternal rewards and punishments for what we do in this world. If we think
about it, the fact that we know these things makes us more, not less responsible,
or more irresponsible, depending on which way we go.
“We should have expected,” Rahner continues, “that He [Christ] would
compose a magnificent literary work; we should have especially expected that
He would reform the world politically and socially, that He would establish in
some visible way the Kingdom of God.”5 In other words, Christ did not do any
of the things that we might have expected of a great and magnanimous man.
Obviously, we would suspect that, if He did not do such expected things, the
reason for it was crucial. Success in these areas was not what God had in mind
for us as His main purpose or teaching. Christ did not consider success in the
affairs of this world to be essential. In the end, He was crucified as if to say that
what He brought to man would be rejected.
The passage in Rahner that most struck me, I think, was this one: “It is
difficult for us to accept the fact that Jesus really cannot do anything else except
save souls”6 (emphasis added). What a remarkably illuminating passage! Christ
is a pious man. He does not dabble in or perfect literature, politics, art,
technology, or science. As a carpenter, He produced no masterpiece that we can
find in the British Museum. Even the often eloquent words the evangelists
attribute to Him are disputed by the Scripture scholars. What is left is the central
point of Christianity. Christ dwelt amongst us essentially so that we would
understand that eternal life is the reason for our creation. What about all the
things to do in the world? He leaves them for us to figure out, but He does not
leave us only to ourselves. He gives us the gifts of wisdom and discernment; and
He has become flesh so we who are in the flesh might just keep in mind what
each life is ultimately about.
“Created reality,” Rahner concludes, “gives man a place in which he can
make his free choices.”7 No one else can make these choices for us. The priority
is: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God,” then “all these things will be added to
you.” By reversing this principle, we fail to understand that Jesus’s life was
directed to leading each of us to eternal life, not to an inner-worldly utopia. The
many things that He did not do in this life were not meant to imply that human
things were worthless, only that they were not first.
Despite the word itself, Catholicism is not an “ism.” That is, it is not
essentially a body of doctrine, though it does rightly seek to formulate accurately
for the human mind what it holds. That is what the creeds are about. It does have
doctrine to be sure. These teachings enable us to better understand what and who
Christ is, what reality is. Our very minds seek to know this. Like all words, they
point to the reality that they are intended to understand and help make clear. But
Catholicism is nothing if it is not a meeting or personal encounter with Christ.
How this is possible is what we strive to explain and understand.
1 Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: Fontana, 1964), 58.
2 Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfection of Our Nature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).
3 Robert Cardinal Sarah and Nicholas Diat, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith,
trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 190.
4 Karl Rahner, Spiritual Exercises, trans. Kenneth Baker, S.J. (South Bend, IN: St.
Augustine’s Press, 2014), 122.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., 123.
7 Ibid., 174.
 CHAPTER FOUR

ON BEING ROMAN CATHOLIC

“It will not be out of place to consider the ancient tradition, teaching, and
faith of the Catholic Church, which was revealed by the Lord,
proclaimed by the apostles, and guarded by the fathers. For upon this
faith the Church is built, and if anyone were to lapse from it, he would no
longer be a Christian either in fact or in name.”

—St. Athanasius, Letter to Serapionem,

Office of Trinity Sunday

“From splendor, he [Morgoth/Lucifer] fell through arrogance to

contempt for all things save himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless.
Understanding he turned to subtlety in perverting to his own will all that
he would use, until he became a liar without shame.”

—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927), 31

“After grace had been revealed, both learned and simple folk are bound
to explicit faith in the mysteries of Christ, chiefly as regards those which
are observed throughout the Church, and publically proclaimed, such as
the articles that refer to the Incarnation. …”

—Thomas Aquinas,
 Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 2, a. 7

I.
The point of revelation in the Catholic sense, as we have seen, is that the world
itself exists as an arena in which individual persons, each with a proper name, in
their dealings with one another, in whatever time or place, work out their
salvation. Salvation does not mean the preservation of at least some men down
the ages in this world. Sooner or later, the race of men on this planet will cease.
Salvation does recognize that the human species has reproduced itself in
generation after generation since its beginning. The numbers of men, seven or
eight billion, is a larger number than at any time in past history. The natural
goods of the world were placed in the world for man to learn what they are and
how to use them. Subhuman goods have no ultimate purpose except through his
purpose.
This ongoing dependence on what was given in the planet’s natural richness
was itself a function of man’s intelligence and creative capacity. He was not
created with everything given to him. He was created, as Aristotle said, not with
claws or hides, but with “a mind and a hand” so that he could learn to provide
for himself. This implicit power of mind was the initial confidence that God had
in creating a rational being within the world.
Yet, all of this given world existed not as man’s purpose to deal with it, but
so that, in living in it and dealing with it, he might achieve the personal salvation
of each human being, which specifically is to participate in the inner Trinitarian
life of God. Too, this suggests not just that the existence of God is central to
what we are. We are not given minds just to have minds but that through them
we might know the truth of things. This God, moreover, is Trinitarian, a single
God with a diversity of persons, a communion or, if you will, a friendship.
The title of this chapter is not John Locke’s The Reasonableness of
Christianity, nor is it Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, neither of
which treatise had much to do with Catholicism and, consequently, little to do
with the ultimate reaches of reason either. Yet, it is more than C. S. Lewis’ Mere
Christianity. The reason that properly belongs to Catholicism delights to hear
any objections to its truth. Such objections incite us to clarity through
distinction. Catholicism is a revelation confident in its own grounding and
coherence.
This attitude is not one of arrogance, but neither is it a kind of modesty that
does not speak the truth for fear of offending someone who misapprehends or
denies it. If someone disavows it or any of its basic tenets, he must give a reason
for his disagreements. Arguments against Catholicism can, in turn, be examined
for their own truth content or lack thereof. Such objections are indirect teachers
of what is true, of what is hidden in what is proclaimed. Thinking erroneously is
an occasion for thinking correctly. We owe to error the courtesy to find the truth
for which it gropes.
Catholicism claims to be true but only on the basis of evidence, reason, and
dependable testimony. The claim is now just a blind velleity. If it is just another
form of inconclusive humanitarianism that gets along with everything because it
distinguishes itself from nothing, it is not worth paying much attention to. It is
not just another relativism or unfounded opinion. Thus, it cannot avoid dealing
with positions that claim it to be false. The title of a book of mine is, precisely,
The Mind That Is Catholic.1 Catholicism is an intellectual religion. It is not
credible if no case can be made for its validity. The final words in Chesterton’s
1905 book, Heretics, were that the last defenders of reason in the modern world
would be the believers in that distinct revelation that alone is directed to reason.2
If my understanding of the modern mind is accurate, we have already
reached the point that Chesterton saw over a hundred years ago. Catholicism
almost alone defends reason that is based on the integrity of the mind related to
what is. We are the last to hold that it is a given world that we do not create of
our own minds. Yet, with these same minds, we do discover and articulate what
is. In a world of institutionalized relativism, any claim to truth is chastised as
arrogant or fanatic. Catholics seem like braggarts who doubt the modern mind’s
basic prejudices—and they do.
This concept reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon I once saw. When home
television sets were becoming common, Lucy is visiting Charlie Brown in his
house. She is in the parlor before the TV set. She boasts to Charlie: “Our
television screen is bigger than yours.” Charlie across the room, good guy that
he is, responds: “It is? That’s fine. I’ll bet you enjoy it.” In the next scene,
Charlie looks at a book. Lucy continues to provoke him: “My dad makes more
money than your dad. Our house is a lot better than yours too.” But before a
deflated Lucy, Charlie happily explains: “I realize that and I am very happy for
you.” In the final scene, Lucy tightens her fists before an uncomprehending
Charlie who just doesn’t get it. She yells at him: “You drive me crazy!”
This claim to truth, both of reason and revelation, does drive the modern
world precisely crazy. As implied in John’s Gospel, truth incites the persecution
that Christ told His disciples to expect. Catholicism’s most reasonable teachings
sound crazy in a world that denies any order in nature or in the human being that
is not placed there by man alone. It also sounds crazy to those who have
habituated themselves to accept aberrations like abortion, internet addictions,
divorce, and fetal experimentation as normal, when they merely mean they are
frequent. But even the word “crazy” has no meaning if no order or no normal
can be found with which to compare it.
In the Divine Office for Trinity Sunday, St. Athanasius (d. 373) speaks of the
inner life of the Godhead. This is the teaching about the reality that most
challenges our reason to be itself more reasonable. Athanasius advised us to
consider the ancient, traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. It was revealed
by the Lord, proclaimed by the Apostles, and guarded by the Church fathers. If
we lapse from this teaching, we would not be Catholic either “in fact or in
name.” We are, no doubt, in a world filled with lapsed Catholics, a world that
usually rejects any proposition that even claims to be true.
Yet, it does not take a genius to grasp why the premises of relativism must
claim, as true, that there is no truth. With this inescapable contradiction, we
begin our reasoning. If the denial of truth is itself “true,” it cannot be true that
there is no truth. Other truths—truth itself—are built precisely on this
inescapable principle of contradiction, as the classical writers have always
understood. Our world is filled with minds carrying about within them
unresolved contradictions. The problem is not so much the possibility of
resolving the contradictions but with our willingness to live according to what is
not contradictory once we admit what is true.
We are also tempted to maximize Church membership by minimizing what
doctrines we are to believe. Catholicism holds that everything essential that we
need to know in revelation is present in the beginning. It is handed down to us
with the guarantee of its integrity, with the divine safeguard of its remaining the
same down the generations. Our understanding of what is revealed can deepen.
What is revealed remains the same. What does this insistence that we already
have what we need to know mean? It means that thinking about what is revealed
should make us more reasonable. This conclusion implies that the origins of
reason and revelation are identical.
To reject revelation somehow makes us less capable of knowing and seeing
what is. From the beginning era, we were told what we needed to know for our
salvation—itself the purpose of the Incarnation—that we hear, that is,
understand the Word now made flesh so that we can be spoken to in our
languages. God was not negligent by not telling us more. He did not reveal every
last detail so that there was nothing left for us to figure out for ourselves. One
can hardly overestimate the importance of this fact. He left wide spaces for us to
use our own brains. This revelation about God’s inner life was given to us. As a
consequence, we also come to know more than we could have known about
everything else.
Aquinas tells us that not only is grace revealed but that it is given to both the
simple and the learned. Catholicism is not an elitism or a gnosticism. For every
Doctor of the Church, hundreds of ordinary saints can be listed. Catholicism
does not presuppose that the simple of our kind know nothing. The Apostles
were ordinary fishermen but by no means stupid. The parables were explained to
them, but not always to everyone (Mk 4:1–12). Nor does it maintain that
learning has no place or that everyone has the intellect of a Thomas Aquinas.
Catholicism holds that most everyone can understand the Creed, but it also holds
that a commentary of, say, Aquinas or Newman is both helpful and necessary if
we are to understand the full profundity of what has been handed down to us.
The mysteries that both the simple and the learned know are to be publically
proclaimed by the Church to the world, especially those teachings that have to
do with the Incarnation. That is, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as all available
evidence shows, actually existed in this world as a human being. This
understanding is why we have the Creed, itself a veritable mine of classical
thought. Faith, in the Catholic sense, is not an escape from reason, but a truth
addressed to it in order that it might be more fully reason. The central issues of
the life of Christ from His baptism through His public life, crucifixion,
Resurrection, Ascension, and sending of the Spirit account for both the divine
initiative and for our relation to it, in our deeds and in our thoughts.

II.
Today, every effort is made to render innocuous or unimportant the differences
that exist among the world’s philosophies and religions. We ask how religions
are alike, not how they differ as if differences are insignificant. We should,
indeed, know at what points, if any, religions agree and why. But they do differ.
Many want a parliament of religions, not a true Church. This similarity
sentiment can cow religion into political uniformity, into an embarrassment that
it is not like other religions. In one view, religion is downplayed because of the
various so-called wars of religion. The wars of the early modern period were
caused, so it was claimed, by religious differences.
In both Hobbes (d. 1679) and Rousseau (d. 1778), the solution was to subject
all religion to state power in the name of civil peace. The result elevates
economic and material interests over intellectual and spiritual ones. Men will not
have time for or interest in any transcendental issues if they are concerned with
labor and politics. Yet, Chesterton said religions do not differ much in externals.
All have roughly similar garb, music, and gestures. They differ in what they hold
to be true. That fact cannot be avoided by examining externals.
From such a viewpoint, a religion that claims to be true must be rendered
clawless. Freedom of religion must come to mean merely freedom of worship.
We can believe whatever outlandish things we want inside church walls. But
outside of them we must conform to state imposed and enforced rules. The
public works of religion must conform to state laws. These laws, in turn, have no
other justification but themselves in their own self-defined statement. Written
constitutions to limit government by checks and balances have been rendered
inoperable. Any natural or transcendent law that in turn allows the appeal of a
civil law to a higher law is rejected. The state is absolutely sovereign.
The second beginning passage above was from Tolkien’s account of the
“First Age,” as he called it. Before the coming of men, there occurred the fall of
the angel or valar named Morgoth. He is more familiar to us as Lucifer. He had
contempt for all things except himself. He turned everything to one’s own
purpose. He lied about the truth of the things that are. We are to read literature,
it is said, so that we will have explained to us what happens in human nature that
we do not experience directly or that we do not fully understand when we do
experience it. Thus, when it happens, we will recognize what is at stake. We find
here some relation to the state, the culture that lies to us about the nature of our
moral acts that calls what is evil good. Such lies incite us to think that to do what
is evil is our right and thus good.
But I do not propose here a critique of the absolute state, however necessary
it is to understand its reality and nature. In St. John’s Gospel, we are told that
dire things will also happen to followers of Christ because of, not in spite of,
what they believe about who Christ is. Many Christians have died in many
persecutions.3 Many people, especially Jews, comment on the relative
indifference that Catholics often show for the fate of their fellow believers in
other lands. Unlike the Jews, however, Catholics technically have no armies, no
independent force. As members of this religion, they are defenseless because, in
their view, issues of defense or protection are functions of the state, not religion.
When the state itself is disordered, they usually have to suffer the consequences.
 III.
What is it that I want to say about being Catholic? Basically, that it makes sense.
Walker Percy’s remark is striking. When asked by hostile critics why he became
a Catholic, he responded, “What else is there?” He did not say this because he
was uninformed about the “what else.” Catholicism is genuinely interested in
these other belief systems. As we learn from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and
Augustine too, we do not really understand the full truth of something unless we
can explain the arguments against it.
Are science, technology, or some other system real threats to the validity of
Catholicism? Most often, when examined, we can distinguish between the truth
and falsity of some position thought to undermine Catholicism. This effort to
understand reasons for its rejection is why Catholicism has always been and
must be an intellectual revelation. It recognizes that we do need teachers of
wisdom on the human side. Faith is addressed to reason, to a reason that must
itself do all it can to be reasonable, to know what is true.
In a book of mine, Rational Pleasures, I recalled what Benedict XVI held,
namely, that the modern world is little more than a gigantic effort to accomplish
the transcendental ends of Catholicism, not by grace and faith, but by our own
efforts in this world. Marxists maintained that the world is disordered because
believers spend their time with the next life, not improving this one. In practice,
the opposite usually happens. Those who are most concerned with the next life
are also those who are most concerned about this one. Catholicism, along with
Plato, maintains that what we do or do not do in this life is to be judged precisely
because of the importance of each actual person and the deeds that do or do not
flow from him.
The assumption that human happiness is ahead of us but still within this
world has become the real, often implied, end of our technology and politics.
The eradication of death; of evil by economic, political, and technical means; the
preservation of Earth for its own sake—these have become the substitutes for
Catholicism. These are the idols of our time. It has always struck me as odd, the
emphasis that Scripture places on the first commandment, not to worship false
idols. But as it turns out, this commandment is the essential one. The unraveling
of man’s good and of his nature itself follows from its denial.
Being Roman Catholic, in conclusion, is the great intellectual adventure of
our kind. We are invited to participate in it, but we can refuse it. It is a realism of
its own kind. It is certainly not liberal, as moderns understand it, nor is it
conservative. The way that I put it to myself is that it is Thomistic. It gives full
credit to reason and to what it can affirm by human powers. But it is also aware
of the Fall and the consequences of sin. It sees that the real drama of our lives
consists in how we live in whatever polity in which we dwell. The vast divine
plan is overwhelming. Yet, it includes individual persons who live in time.
Our final end is not in this world, even though we originate here. As St. Paul
said, a divine plan works itself out in the cosmos in which we find ourselves. We
are included in this plan. But we are free to reject it insofar as it pertains to each
of us. Many of our kind seem to do so. We do not underestimate evil, nor make
it more powerful than God’s grace. The Church communicates to us everything
we need to know about our final end. The same Church insists that we must use
our minds and good sense. We best know that revelation is addressed to us when
we realize that we do not know everything by our own powers.
Of these curious things that we cannot figure out by ourselves, revelation
sheds light on our minds. It guides us to what we do not know. We learn that
God not only exists, but He exists as three persons, one of whom came and dwelt
amongst us. He told us enough to save our souls, and even improve our polities
if we would. But we had to live and be open to a gift that we did not merit.
In the end, all is gift. Nothing needs to exist, yet it does. To be a Roman
Catholic means to be open to this gift and to be charged by it to understand what
we really are: persons invited to live within the inner life of the Godhead. We
may accept or reject this invitation in the course of our lives. That, finally, is
why we are given our lives: to make this choice. All else perhaps matters, but
nothing matters so much.

1 James V. Schall, The Mind That Is Catholic (Washington: The Catholic University of
America Press, 2008).
2 G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (New York: John Lane Co., 1905).
3 See George Marlin, Christian Persecutions in the Middle East (South Bend, IN: St.
Augustine’s Press, 2015); Michael Coren, Hatred: Islam’s War on Christianity
(Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 2014).
 CHAPTER FIVE

ON WHAT REPLACES CHRISTIANITY

From Screwtape’s Toast at the Devils’ Banquet: “The overturn of free

peoples and the multiplication of slave states are, for us, a means
(besides, of course, being fun); but the real end is the destruction of the
individual. For only individuals can be saved or damned, can become
sons of the Enemy [God] or food for us. The ultimate value, for us, of
any revolution, war, or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery,
hatred, rage, and despair which it may produce. I’m as good as you is a
useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far
deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily
excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of
gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every
road which might finally lead him to Heaven.”

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

(1959), 170

“A self-contained and self-centered humanity would chill us in the same

way as a self-contained and self-centered human being. For the spiritual
hungers of humanity are never merely hungers for humanity.”

—G. K. Chesterton, G.K.C. as M.C.: Being a

Collection of Thirty-Seven Introductions, ed. J.P. de
Fonseka (London: Methuen, 1929)1
 I.
The major reason for opposition to Catholicism is, I think, the suspicion that its
basic core is in fact true. Somehow the culture’s rejection does explain the
reality in which we live. The hatred of the Church throughout the centuries, and
more so today, is a real hatred, though rarely recognized as such. The Canticle of
Zechariah at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, a prayer that we be delivered from
the “hands of those who hate us,” is not a mere insignificant aside (Lk 1:67–79).
The abidingness and recognition of the existence of such hatred needs to be
recognized. How we respond to it manifests the Christian teaching about
repentance, forgiveness, and mercy.
Such hatred almost always arises from this premonition, sometimes
articulated, sometimes not, that Catholicism’s claim to the truth about man,
cosmos, and God is not a mere “ism” or just a pious wish, myth, or fairy tale.
Further, it is usually recognized that, if it is true, definite consequences follow in
each one’s own life, effecting how he is or is not living in this world. The living
in this world and one’s transcendent destiny are always kept together and
carefully related in Catholicism. Hatred of the truth is consequent on an inner
refusal to conform oneself and one’s way of life to a truth that explains oneself
to himself, a truth that best describes one’s own real good. If, as Screwtape
rightly says, only individuals with names can be saved, then it logically follows
that only individuals with names can be lost. We are not dealing with
abstractions. Usually, the final rejection of what is good is consequent on a long
series of personal acts lacking in humility, virtue, kindness, and charity.
But, as Screwtape also implies, evil too and its works are bound together.
There is a logic to them: one misstep leads to another. It is almost eerie. If Satan
is allied against himself, how can he stand? (Mk 3:26). Much of the modern
world desperately tries to explain the world on the hypothesis that Catholicism is
not true.2 Once this avenue is closed off, another plausible route must be sought
to explain the same world. Philosophy, including modern philosophy, will
include an account of these alternate efforts to explain things and why they do
not succeed.3 We should not be surprised by this ferment. Unless someone has
some theory of repentance and forgiveness, he will most likely not admit that the
way he is living is wrong. Thus, by closing off one inadequate explanation of his
life after another, he has to develop a rationale about why what he does is
nonetheless justified.
We forget that the human mind works as actively in justifying evil as it does
in accepting what is objectively right and good. Indeed, perhaps it works harder.
It is more difficult to concoct plausible reasons why one acts or understands
wrongly than it is to affirm the truth of things. This difficulty seems to be what is
implied in Christ’s comment about the superior wisdom of the children of those
who follow him (Lk 16:8). The essence of all ideology is that, at some point in
explication, it does not conform to the way things are. The history of human
thought can be seen, as Gilson pointed out in his The Unity of Philosophical
Experience, as a long and connected series of hypotheses designed to explain
why invalid theories are true.4
We often hear expressions like “the post-Christian era” to describe the time
in which we live. It is not a bad phrase provided we realize that every step in
rejecting a Christian teaching keeps that very teaching before our eyes. Just as
Christianity preserved many pagan practices, a “post-Christian era” will retain
many Christian customs and ideas without acknowledging their Christian
origins. They will usually be disguised under different names or explanations.
We will notice a pseudo-heaven and this-worldly hell. We will propose an
explanation for sin not based on free will. We will have an inner-worldly
immortality of sorts. Evil and good will appear in Manichean fashion as two
separate gods. But a post-Christian age will invent new names and explanations
for them. It will logically develop ideas into a new form or synthesis that is
anything but Christian.
To know what a post-Christian era might mean, no doubt, it is helpful to
know what Christianity is and maintains about itself. And this knowledge, in
spite of the Catechism, is not easy to come by today. We used to talk of
Christian heresies. These were explanations of one or another Christian idea in a
different, erroneous, or inaccurate way. But the heretic generally did not disagree
with the whole corpus of Christian ideas. Luther did not set out to found a new
church but to correct what he thought was wrong with the original one. Every
heretic usually thought that he was giving a better explanation than the Church
gave for a given issue. One of the best ways to study Catholicism, as everyone
from Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century to Chesterton in the twentieth
century thought, was precisely to study the heretics.
What replaces Christianity, we can assume, will want to appear to itself, at
least, to be logically coherent. It will claim to explain human life and its earthly
condition, usually in what is called a scientific way. Indeed, that will be one of
its basic propositions, namely, that everything can be explained by scientific
method. What cannot be so explained will be said not to exist or to be worth
studying. Scientific method itself depends on quantity and the mathematics
based on it. If reality also contains things that are not quantifiable, that can be
reached by other methods, these facts will be denied or ignored. The scientific
method, on its own terms, does not explain what is not related to matter. The fact
that I understand mathematics does not make this knowledge itself a matter of
quantity.
What are the most obvious tenets to a worldview that replaces Christianity? I
would begin by pointing out that other worldviews like Islam, which also intend
to replace Christianity, have remained pretty much consistent with themselves
over the centuries. It is true that Islam can be considered a New Testament, or
better an Old Testament heresy. Most of its ideas were present in some form
before its arrival on the scene in the seventh century. And Islam is indeed one of
the major candidates to replace Christianity in many parts of the world, as it did
in the seventh and eighth centuries with the Muslim conquest of Persia, North
Africa, Spain, the Holy Land, and across the central Asian plains to parts of
India.5 Other candidates like Communism and Hinduism can also be considered
as possible replacements in the right circumstances.6
Another way to look at this issue would be to consult birth rates among
various nations and peoples. Birth rates among Christian people, including
Catholics, in Europe and North America are way below replacement needs. It is
quite clear that what is called the white race is in a rapid proportionate decline in
its overall numbers in its own areas. The largest countries today, China and
India, are themselves experiencing a change in population growth. What seems
clear now is something that was not really a concern of earlier generations:
several parts of the human race, often on the basis of dubious scientific theories
about ecology and economics, have chosen to reduce their overall presence in
the world. If this trend were a phenomenon among everyone, we would not look
on it as a problem of the relation of nations to each other. But when one group
declines and another takes its place by immigration or other means, as Aristotle
had also noticed, the newer and more populous people with their culture and
religion or ideology will probably dominate future political entities.
But a causal relation does exist between population and ideas. The world
number of abortions since 1980 is something like one billion, three hundred
million. The conception and subsequent abortion of such children were results of
ideas about ecology, personal choice, science, economic capacity, and freedom.
The Planned Parenthood motto, “Every child a wanted child” is, in principle, a
good one. The trouble is that its authors do not mean that the actual children we
beget are the same ones that we should want and take care of. Rather, it means
that, if we do not want such children of conception, we need not have them
simply because of our wants. Unfortunately, too often these days “will” decides
“being,” being no longer determines will.
The conceived infants, in such a view, have no intrinsic worth due to their
being human. That switch in meaning of what is meant by the word “wanted” is
one of the tenets of the ideology that replaces Christianity. We do not proceed
from the being of a thing to how we relate to it. We rather proceed from our will
to create our own reality, from what we want to and what we allow and enable to
exist. Our empty streets are haunted by eliminated children who ought to have
been allowed to continue in their already-begun lives. These same streets are
increasingly populated by the children of other places and nations who did not
refuse life to their children. The common name for this general view is
humanitarian. It has come to mean not what constitutes human excellence, but
what has exclusive origin in the human will and the human mind and artifacts
that put this view into existence.

II.
Perhaps the central idea that replaces Christianity is the idea that man can save
himself, or better, that he needs no savior other than himself to be what he is.
Nothing is “wrong” with him that he cannot identify and fix himself. Nor does
he have any transcendent destiny, the achievement or rejection of which is in his
hands. He needs no redeemer. A savior or redeemer implies the existence of
something he cannot achieve by himself. None of his actions have transcendent
meaning. This is the very opposite of the classical view that all of our deeds and
words can reach God. Humanism thus comes to mean that man is the architect of
his own being. He does not receive what he is from God or nature. He is nothing
until he makes himself into something he wants to be. He especially does not
want to be what classical thought and religion understood him to be. Thus he
implements changes contrary to these understandings at each step in his own
actual being.
Man’s given being, as in the tradition since Genesis, is not seen as itself a
created being. His individual being, then, provides no basis for worship of a
Creator who formed him to be what he is. In himself, man is simply a result of
chance evolution. He might just as well have been something else. He can only
be satisfied if what he is owes its content to himself alone. He is not a social
being who requires others for him to be complete and happy. Each man is free to
define himself and his view of the cosmos. No one’s happiness depends on
anyone else but himself. A world filled with autonomous men is a world full of
men with no relation to each other except from power. No one can appeal to
principle if no principles exist other than what I will for myself.
The state, at first sight, exists to enable everyone to be what he wants to be.
The collectivity enables as many people as possible to achieve their own vision
of their happiness, whatever it is. No common good exists other than the greatest
good of the greatest number, which is not properly a common good. There is no
truth, no intelligible order in being. No criterion exists by which we can say that
one kind of life is better or more complete than another. This was why
Screwtape, in the introductory citation, said that the notion that “everyone is as
good as everyone else” undermines any reasonable order. Logically, it means
that no distinctions can be made in things or lives. No distinction between good
and bad, true and false can be located in reality except what I define as good or
bad.
However, since in real life various and contradictory understandings of life
oppose each other, we must erect some institution to decide what arbitrary way
of life is to be allowed. If one man thinks injustice is all right, the one who does
not think it is all right must protect himself from the consequences of his
neighbor’s theory. This selection between allowable ways of life becomes the
designated function of the state and its power. It takes on the task of keeping
peace by adjudicating and forcing peace among those exercising conflicting
understandings of their rights. Peace is not agreement in a common
understanding of being and truth. It is a condition of non-hostility that is based
on and enforced by power. Further, since ideas cause conflict according to some
standard of truth, they will need to be carefully regulated. There will be no free
speech, but only non-hate speech. No one will be allowed to say that anything is
wrong with anything or anybody.
The only conceivable opposition to such a worldview would be a claim that
there is a truth in reality to which man is invited freely to know and pursue. This
view would suggest that it is possible to say that some ways of life are better
than others, even that some are wrong. A distinction between good and evil does
exist outside our subjective estimate of what it is. It is not enough today to hold
that no distinction between good and evil exists. We cannot even express any
public opinion on the issue. It is perceived as prejudicial to those who practice
what is disordered, against their “rights.” This very expression would entail
calling things that we did not like to be evil, a calling that is not allowed
expression. Hate-speech legislation is designed ostensibly to keep the peace.
What it does in fact is to deny the free speech and intelligence that identifies
what is evil and what is not. It prevents an examination of what is legal by any
higher measure of what is true.
The accurate calling of evil to be evil and good to be good would disturb the
“peace,” which now has come to mean lack of any claim to or standard whereby
truth can be identified and explained. Hence, no discussion, no dialogue can be
allowed. We are locked into a welter of diverse opinions about which we cannot
meaningfully speak. There is no objective answer to any question. The
suggestion that some fundamental difference between good and evil exists would
be considered to be hate speech. It is thus not surprising that the rise of
subjectivism paradoxically involves a decline in any forum wherein the case for
truth might be spoken. This is as true of universities as it is of politics and media
exposure. The wars of the world are now first in the language of the world.
Such is the general outline of what has replaced Christianity as the public
order of the old Christendom and its overseas enclaves. We now witness a
general effort to eliminate as much as possible all legal and cultural references to
anything Christian and to penalize its expression. While some Christian presence
is found outside of Europe and its offshoots, some two-thirds of the world’s
population is not Christian in any case and is not usually open to its influence.
Political regimes in these areas range from hostile to minimally tolerant,
provided no sign of significant Christian growth is present. A few African and
Asian states may be exceptions. The rest of the world, in some way, has to
confront the same ideas that are replacing Christianity. One widely held view is
that the way to tame the growing aggressiveness of Islam is to subject it to the
same post-modern forces that tamed Christianity. But that would just be to
extend the same problem beyond its sources of origin. Islam thus far, as we will
see, has shown itself rather impervious to these forces, which explains much of
its current strength.

III.
Catholics in particular have debated the nature of what is called the New
Evangelization, designed to confront the tenets of the post-Christian world. Pope
Benedict XVI especially emphasized the importance of renewed attention to
Europe, the cultural origin of both Christianity itself and of these aberrations. He
also faced and clarified its intellectual origins. The evangelization of Islam
seems almost impossible in any meaningful sense. Christians, not Muslims, are
left with a rhetoric of dialogue when there is really no one with whom to
dialogue with, except when it is seen as a weakness or opportunity to expand
one’s own views. Christianity, no doubt, cannot be itself without some serious
endeavor to make itself known to those who do not know the centrality of Christ
in human affairs. But in general, the political and social obstacles to making the
faith known are almost insurmountable because of the nature of the secular
humanism that controls the culture.
Much the same is true with the Chinese, the Hindu, and the Buddhist world.
The Hindus and Buddhists have begun, as has Islam, to look for expansion into
the post-Christian world. They have made significant progress. Latin America,
while it remains largely Catholic, is witnessing a large shift to evangelical forms
of Christianity or to more Marxist types of social action as the response to the
situation. These are but more instances of a wrong answer to the problems as
posed.
We do find schools of thought that maintain, with some scriptural and much
Augustinian support, that, as the world nears its end, there will be fewer and
fewer believers; only a remnant will remain. But the replacement of Christianity,
in its intellectual roots, as Eric Voegelin once wrote, seems to be more related to
a decline in faith of Christian men. They were impatient with the means of
prayer, sacrifice, sacrament, and judgment that informed classic Catholicism.
They began to consider these means to their transcendent ends to be
impediments to their success in this world. So they turned to this very world to
fulfill what they conceived to be their “right” to a better order of this life. To do
this, they had to transform the Christian doctrines into tools or incentives for
social goals in this world, for its inner-worldly completion of man’s ultimate
destiny. This ultimate destiny no longer contains any element beyond this world.
Today, it seems, the fallen mind finds “intelligence” only where it is imposed.
We have cast off our ability to wonder before the truth and beauty of what is.
In pursuing this line, modern men ended up with that world of self-
fulfillment that we described above. The saving of the earth becomes more
important than the saving of souls. The freedom to choose what we want
replaces that freedom based on the truth. Action replaces contemplation. Having
replaced being, an inner-worldly eschatology explains man’s purpose on this
planet. And if man’s terrestrial sojourn is itself finite, which it seems to be in
scientific terms, we must look to space, to other planets to carry on man’s work
in this world. The whole human race and its billions of inhabitants over the eons
seem so transient.
Without a theory or reality in which each human being has a transcendent
origin and destiny, the whole record of mankind on this planet seems to mean
nothing if all we find in it are myriads of men seeking their own definition of
what they are about. It is in this direction, perhaps, that, in the end,
evangelization must move. The post-modern world may, in the end, just provide
the logic that enables us to see that what Christian men gave up was far superior
to what they offered to replace it. It is one thing never to have been offered a
transcendent end as the purpose of human life. It is quite another thing to have
been offered it and then to reject it. What replaces Catholicism is a rejection of it
that also implicitly rejects the reality of what man is.

1 Quoted in Ian Ker, G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2011), 614.
2 See James V. Schall, The Modern Age (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011).
3 See David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence
(New York: Cambridge, 2008).
4 Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
[1937] 1999); David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution.
5 See Robert Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquest and the Creation of an
Islamic Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Thomas Madden, A
Concise History of the Crusades (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).
6 See George Weigel, “China’s Population Crisis: An Evangelical Opportunity?” First
Things 27 (January 2016), https://www.firstthings.com/web-
exclusives/2016/01/chinas-population-crisis-an-evangelical-opportunity.
 CHAPTER SIX

ON THE “OPENNESS TO THE

WHOLE OF REALITY”

“What is meant [by the philosophy of St. Thomas] is an openness to the

whole of reality in all its parts and dimensions, without either reducing
reality or confining thought to particular forms or aspects (and without
reducing singular aspects into absolutes), as intelligence demands in the
name of objective and integral truth.”

—John Paul II, “Perennial Philosophy of St.

Thomas,” delivered at the Angelicum, Rome,
September 17, 19791

“Yet, you alone who are good, the source of all life, have made all that
is, so that you might fill your creation with blessings and bring joy to
many of them by the glory of your light.”

—Roman Missal, Preface to the

Fourth Canon of the Mass

“In reality, the name for that deep amazement at man’s worth and dignity
is the Gospel, that is, the Good News. It is also called Christianity. This
amazement determines the Church’s mission in the world and, perhaps,
even more so, in the ‘modern world.’ This amazement, which is also a
conviction—at its deepest root, it is the certainty of faith, but in a hidden
 and mysterious way it vivifies every aspect of authentic humanism …”

—John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, §10

I.
We can understand what is proposed to replace Catholicism, both the arguments
and the flaws in them. The intelligence seen in revelation has always taken
dissent from its whole truth seriously. A point of truth will always be found in it
with which it is possible to agree. While recognizing its proper limits,
Catholicism has never underplayed the importance of intelligence in matters of
faith. Today we are almost used to hearing that faith indicates something
unintelligible. It does not mean this, of course. If I do not fully understand some
scientific formula, it does not follow that it is not, therefore, intelligible. It just
means that I do not have the wit or time to spend on it to see its order and
validity. If a matter or proposition of faith is not fully understood, it is not
because it has no intrinsic intelligence to it. It just means that for now, I am not
in a position to know or to have explained to me what this intelligibility is. It is
true that we do not understand everything about everything. But this does not
obviate the fact that we always understand something about everything, even the
issues of faith. Moreover, it is not unreasonable to accept authority or witness for
what we do not immediately observe by ourselves if this authority itself is
credible.2
In this chapter, we want to take a more careful look at just what “mind”
means. Mind is not simply brain, a physical organ, or soul, a thing of the spirit,
though it is related to and operates through both.3 Intelligence as such is not
material. It can reflect back on itself and know at the same time that it is doing
so. It can hold two or three ideas together at the same time and know that it is
doing so. This luminousness could not happen if the mind were simply a
material organ. The mind is connected to the world through its body and its
senses. It is that power by which what is not ourselves comes to reside in our
memories and active knowledge when we think on something, be it spiritual or
material in origin.
In particular, we want to look at a mind that does not, a priori, exclude one
or other realm of reality from its ken on the grounds that it does not conform to
some method for acquiring certain types of particular knowledge. Methods can
only reveal what they are designed to reveal. Method itself is an idea. If our
method excludes something, it does not follow that the thing excluded does not
exist. It only means that we are not looking for it or considering it in a way that
can make it known to us.
By all accounts, the most complete presentation of Catholic mind is found in
the works of Thomas Aquinas. The work of Thomas is an apt place to consider
the notion of our minds being “open to all reality”—mens capax omnium. The
Summa Theologiae of Aquinas, amazingly enough, was four thousand and six
folio pages long, some ten thousand articles. The work, moreover, was left
unfinished. It was left unfinished even after a massive amount of work that was,
fortunately, completed. Aquinas died at the relatively young age of forty-nine.
But he himself said that his work was not completed because everything that he
did do, in comparison to what was left to see and understand, was “as straw.”
This famous remark did not imply that what he had understood and passed on
was not important. It rather meant that so much more remained to be known that,
by comparison, what he did know seemed minimal and insufficient.
The Opera Omnia (Complete Works) of Aquinas usually take up a couple of
good sized shelves in any library. Of course, thanks to diligent scholars of the
Dominican Order, the work of Aquinas is now online, together with almost
every aspect of scholarship ever written about him. Does that make it any easier
to comprehend? It makes it more convenient, perhaps, but more overwhelming
too. To understand Aquinas, no one can, or should, want to escape the attentive
task of carefully reading him. Reading Aquinas is an intellectual adventure of a
high order that brings us to the limits of what the mind can know. It also has
intimations of what remains to be known.
It is said that Aquinas had terrible hand script. I have seen reprints of it. It
was pretty bad. I do not wish to expand on the difficulties of reading Aquinas’
texts. St. Thomas in many ways is the easiest and clearest of philosophers to
read. He follows, as he says, the very tendencies of the mind itself. St. Thomas
began to write when he was about twenty-two years old, I believe, with his On
Being and Essence, the De Ente et de Essentia. He stopped a year or so before
his death when he realized that everything that he had written, compared to
God’s light, was inadequate. But, for him, revelation meant, in essence, that we
were to know ever more fully what we did not yet know by ourselves.
Aquinas can be approached in many ways. The best is to read him, of course.
But Thomas needs to be read intelligently. Soon one finds that Aquinas seems
himself to have read and absorbed most everything that was written before his
time, from the Hebrew Bible to the Greek and Roman classics, to the Muslim
commentators, to the Latin and Greek Christian Fathers of the Church. As we
have touched on earlier, he explains the error of something as clearly as he
explains its right understanding. One cannot fully understand what is true about
something if we do not understand what, if anything, is false about it. Still, on
seeing the scope of his work, one can wonder if Aquinas ever slept, so massive
does his learning appear to us. One can wonder if Aquinas would have been
more prolific and productive if he had a modern computer. In many ways, it is
difficult to see how he could have been more learned than he was.
Indeed, it has been said that if you or I should begin just to read the collected
works of Aquinas when we were twenty-two, the year he began to write, and
read steadily eight hours a day until we were forty-nine, when he died, chances
are we could not even read, let alone understand and grasp, what Aquinas was
saying. My own initial reaction to the realization of the mind of Aquinas is
simply: “I am glad we are on the same side.” But that is not just another act of
faith. It is a confidence in, an awe of having read enough of, Aquinas to see that
he goes in the direction of truth, in the direction of what is. Aquinas takes us
outside of ourselves to put what is outside of ourselves back into our souls, only
now with light, with intelligence, while not changing what is outside. As such,
knowledge changes us; it does not change the thing known. This fact leads us to
suspect that things exist in order that we might know them.
This chapter is entitled: “On the Openness to the Whole of Reality.” The title
comes from a lecture that St. John Paul II gave to the Athenaeum Angelicum in
Rome, his alma mater, just after he became pope in 1979. The pope was a first-
class scholar in the works of Aquinas. Philosophy was to be open to the whole,
to how all things related to each other. Philosophy seeks to know precisely the
whole, all that is. Knowledge is not to be reduced to what could be established
by this or that method. This latter approach John Paul II always called
reductionism—that is, we only know what our method allows us to discover by
its usage. Reality is reduced to what a method of knowing yields.
Basically, then, reductionism means this: my theoretical presuppositions do
not include what you are talking about. Therefore, when I use my theory to
understand things, you, using your methodology, think my reality does not exist.
Actually, all that is proved is that my methodology can only yield the results that
the methodology allows. If it presupposes that it applies only to material things,
then it has nothing to say about immaterial things that, like the mind itself,
require and allow for other methodologies to understand things left out by other
methodologies.
 We are all probably aware that revelation in particular is said by rationalists
to be closed to reason because its premises and content do not arise directly from
experience or natural reason. Reality, however, is always larger than reason
considered as a method or calculation. As Aquinas famously said, nothing we
come across in reality, including revelation, can be excluded from our
consideration on the grounds that the truth of what is does not arise from human
reason alone. No student of Aquinas ever said that it did. Revelation still
contains an intelligibility that must be reckoned with, particularly if it deals, as it
does, with some issues that reason itself brings up and is unable fully to
comprehend. Revelation is not, in principle, closed to a power, that is, the mind,
that is itself ordered to all that is.

II.
In an old Peanuts cartoon, Linus is talking to a puzzled Charlie Brown out by the
Stone Fence. “I’ve got this whole Santa Claus bit licked, Charlie Brown!” he
tells him. In the second scene, Charlie has a completely blank face as Linus
continues: “If there is a Santa Claus, he’s going to be too nice not to bring
anything for Christmas, no matter how I act, right?” In the third scene, Linus
throws up his arms in a triumph of logic and shouts: “And if there isn’t any
Santa Claus, then I really haven’t lost anything, right?” The last scene shows a
dumfounded Charlie with his head on his hand looking out over the stone wall
into the distance. “Wrong!” Charlie blurts out, “but I don’t know where.”4
That is a very Aristotelian answer with which Aquinas would agree. We do
often know that things are wrong, but we do not quite know why. This not-
knowing does not mean that no reasons exist. The whole point of philosophic
education is that we learn to find the right reasons. The God-is-a-nice-guy thesis
is pretty much what liberal thought made of Christ. He would not hurt a flea, let
alone punish any sinner. He is not divine, not a revolutionary, but he is definitely
a nice fellow. He would let Linus do whatever he wants and still give him a
present, still save him. One way to make man free, so the theory goes, is to
eliminate the Santa Claus factor, eliminate any distinction between right and
wrong or any accountability for it. Just what we obtain when we exercise this
elimination is probably not the sort of freedom that we were looking for. We end
up with a world in which nothing we do makes any difference.
This roundabout tour through the mind of Charles Schulz brings us to what
we mean when we articulate what the philosophy of Aquinas, with its constant
reference to Aristotle, is all about. It is about real things. John Paul II provided
several insights into the mind of Aquinas that, I think, are useful to Catholic
students and scholars. Indeed, they are pertinent to everyone else who cares to
“know himself,” to use Socrates’ famous phrase from the Oracle.
A passage from Leo Strauss’ incisive book Persecution and the Art of
Writing is instructive here. Strauss, a Jew, pointed out the difference between the
Catholic view of philosophy and that of Muslims and the Hebrews. The most
obvious difference is that the Catholic cleric is required to study philosophy as
part of his religious training. He is concerned with doctrine—with the truth and
how correctly to state it. The Qur’an and the Old Testament, on the other hand,
while they may contain certain philosophic insights, are essentially law books.
The Rabbi or the Imam has to adjust reality to the law book.5 The Christian
revelation is not a law book, but a Person, true God and true man—the Logos.
Christian revelation presumes it is addressing itself to free beings who can think.
In other words, it assumes something common between the divine and human
mind, not forgetting their differences in power and scope.
We can see the significance of this difference between the Jewish and
Muslim approach and that of the Christians if we go to Benedict XVI’s seminal
Regensburg Lecture. Here Pope Benedict had suggested that some signs of
philosophy are found in the Old Testament. The principal one for Christians,
though there are others, is the passage in Exodus wherein Yahweh defines
Himself as “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex 3:14). Benedict made the same point in
another way. He recalled the incident in the Acts of the Apostles where Paul is
called to “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Acts 16:9). Why is this place
in northern Greece significant? We can begin to understand this meaning if we
ask: Why was not Paul told to go to the more numerous Hindus of India, or to
the Persians, or to the distant Chinese? They needed help too. After all, none of
these areas (except parts of Persia) had been converted yet. So going to
Macedonia seems ill-chosen. The larger areas for spreading the Gospel were
ignored. This direction seems, at first, quite odd.
The reason that Paul was called to Greece was of enormous interest. Greece
was the home not of religion, but of the philosophers. Not a few still asked
Tertullian’s question: “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” Tertullian gave
the wrong answer when he said: “Nothing.” As it turns out, Christianity had to
relate itself first to philosophy, not to other religions, precisely in order that it
could be seen as universal. Otherwise, it would have had no common basis on
which to deal with other religions or philosophies. It would have had no
common ground from within human reason whereby it could evaluate the truth
of its own revelation as well as that of other religions.
Revelation was not designed to tell us what we could know or figure out by
our reason. We did not need the Bible to invent the wheel or to know how to
build a house. Revelation was not a complete scheme of life as the books of
other religions often claim to be. This limitation is why we speak of the things of
God and the things of Caesar. We make this distinction on the basis of the
authority of the Gospel itself, from which we can also see that it makes sense.
The Gospel also wants us to use our heads for our own sake. We are, if we can,
to figure out what we need to do by ourselves. Christ did not need to reveal the
content of Aristotle’s Politics because it was already figured out before He came
along. The Gospels were not designed to explain the intricacies of atomic
energy. And it was not a defect or an oversight in God if they did not deal with
things we could know by ourselves. What we could find out by reason, we
should find out by reason. Catholicism itself affirms this position and rejoices in
it.
Revelation was itself addressed to reason. Through reason, revelation is
addressed to the whole man. Thus, revelation was not conceived to be irrational.
In seeking to understand the meaning of revelation, reason in fact became more,
not less, reasonable. Furthermore, revelation was addressed to reason when it
was most reasonable, most consciously thinking of the reality of what is. These
reflections are where Plato and Aristotle, among others, come in. They did have
things to say that were valid and true, and not just to themselves. How did these
things relate to the true things found in revelation? Revelation has its own
internal plan or consistency that can to some extent be understood by any mind
actively thinking about its content and the logic found in it. This background is a
primary aspect of a philosophy open to all being, to all reality, to all that is.

III.
Let me now turn more directly to Aquinas and Pope John Paul II’s remarks on
his philosophy. The first thing we are to notice, recalling something stressed by
Leo XIII, is “the principle of harmony between the truths of reason and those of
faith.”6 This harmony is not merely a blind assumption. Rather, it is a guiding
light. When the mind—that is, we with our minds—sees something incompatible
with our understanding of a point of reason or revelation, we can be pretty sure
that we need to look at it again. We need to rethink our principles and analyses
to be sure that we are not missing something. When something is unresolved,
after all our efforts to figure it out, it is best to leave it there until further events
or reasonings indicate a possible solution. We do not have to have everything
solved for us from the beginning. The whole adventure of human existence
includes its endeavors to comprehend what it is, what the world and its purpose
are.
The one thing that we must keep in mind is that we cannot ever conclude
from reason the specific truths of revelation about the inner essence of the
Godhead. We would already be ourselves gods if we could do this. But we can
reflect on the many things of reason that are also found in the pages of Scripture,
the most important of which is the very fact that revelation seems to understand
the requirements of reason. Why this understanding should be so would make us
suspect that they both are grounded ultimately in the same source. Aquinas’
philosophy is not called a system because it does not claim to have answered
every issue. It is willing to reconsider what it does conclude when new evidence
is available.
Much modern philosophy is based in epistemology, that is, in what tools we
possess inside of us whereby we can know what is out there. Needless to say,
much is at stake here. For much modern thought wants to cut our minds off from
what is. Many see this cutting off of any relation of mind and reality as a way to
liberate us so that we can do whatever we want. For Aquinas, the world is
already out there with its own being and order. Truth means to conform our
minds to what is, not the other way around. Pope John Paul II cites a passage
from the Summa, in which Aquinas states that “the most fundamental order is
found in things and it is from them that our cognition is derived” (ST II-II, q. 26,
a. 1, ad 2).
In an almost amusing aside, Pope John Paul II then adds: “Philosophy does
not consist in a subjective system put together at the pleasure of the philosopher,
but must be the faithful reflection of the order of things as they exist in the
human mind.”7 Do we not have here already intimations of John Paul’s great
encyclical Fides et Ratio? What I take to be of particular importance in this
passage is that, with due intelligence and diligence, “the order of things” is
supposed to exist in the human mind as something derived from existing being,
not as something made up by the mind from itself. Indeed. In one sense, that
inner existence of the knowledge of things not ourselves is what our minds are
for. Let us not be among those who spend their lives not examining real things.
They justify their own lives by claiming that they cannot know what the world is
about or our place in it.
 IV.
Our general topic here has been the openness of our minds to all reality. On
Thursday, April 11, 1776, Samuel Johnson was dining at General Paoli’s home
in London. During the course of conversation, Johnson was still thinking of a
journey to Italy. “A man who has not been in Italy,” he said, “is always
conscious of inferiority, from his not having seen what is expected a man should
see.”8 “What is a man expected to see?” we ask ourselves. More than Italy, I
trust, however lovely Italy can be. As Aquinas puts it, man is capable of seeing
and knowing all that is. This affirmation is not merely a statement of our being,
but a statement of our goal.
In a brief commentary on the words of the Creed about eternal life, Aquinas
states that eternal life “consists in the complete satisfaction of desire, for the
blessed will be given more than they wanted or hoped for. The reason for this
abundance is that, in this life, no one can fulfill his longing, nor can any creature
satisfy man’s desires. Only God satisfies; he infinitely exceeds all other
pleasures.”9 The words of Aquinas are striking. Men will be given more than
they wanted or hoped for.
When we talk of reality, we are initially and usually talking of that
commonsense reality that we all know and move about in. Even the scientists
must start from there and return home to it in the evening. Today many kinds of
knowledge have been developed that even the most ordinary person as well as
the scientists know, knowledge that Aquinas did not have. Still no reason exists
why he would not have been open to such knowledge or incapable of
understanding it once presented to him. Nonetheless, certain ideas and principles
have to be affirmed before any science can be possible. John Paul puts it this
way: “It is rather to be questioned if it was not precisely philosophical realism
that has historically stimulated the realism of the empirical sciences in all their
branches.”10
Science requires a real world that can be investigated, not just thought about.
It needs a world of secondary causes, that is, of beings capable of their own
activities or at least of having separate existence. These ideas, together with the
idea that things are good and had a beginning, were the products or conclusions
of Christian and Jewish revelation. Cultures that lacked these ideas never
developed their own science. Rather they learned it, if they learned it, when it
became available, already developed. Science can be learned or imitated in any
culture, but only on the terms of a science based in reality.
This varied history of the human mind and its opinions about reality brings
John Paul to remind us of how Aquinas dealt with it. Basically, it is impossible
to say something wrong without saying something right. No one can have an
opinion that is absolutely, totally, and in every respect wrong. Understanding
this position is essential to Aquinas’ own method. When he comes to treat a
topic, the first thing that Aquinas does is to make clear what we are talking
about: “What is the question?” Once we have the question, we can take a look at
what others have said about it. It is important to realize that men have been
hashing fundamental questions out for centuries. There are a few new ones, no
doubt, but surprisingly many are asked again and again.
Aquinas next does us the service of stating precisely what arguments stand
against the truth of an issue. Often he was clearer than the original objector
himself. We should not forget that to state accurately an argument against the
truth of something that is not true is itself a true function of the intellect and a
delight. To know error and evil is part of the good of the mind. In this sense, it is
not all bad that we have errors, heresies, sins, lies, and such, since they too are
intelligible. It is important that we know not just what is good but what is bad or
false. “Impossibile est aliquam cognitionem esse totaliter falsum sine alique
veritate” (ST II-II, q. 172, a. 6, co.). Carry that away with you! “It is impossible
that any cognition be totally false without containing at least some truth.” In the
end, in a way, this is the basis of apostolic activity ad gentes, to the nations. The
other side of this consideration is also true. What is not true needs to be
identified as untrue together with the reasons why it might be seen to be true.
With this matter cleared away, Aquinas then states his own argument about the
truth of a thing.
While there are many separate things that we understand as true, still truth is
one. All truth has the same origin, no matter what its particular status or avenue
to our minds. Any truth is related to any other truth through being. There is but
one wisdom. That is, all things cohere. The divine light shines in all that is. In
the revelational tradition, this unifying work is the work of the Holy Spirit, a
reminder that all things circle around the inner Trinitarian life of the Godhead.
We are to be true to what is handed down in Scripture, as we are to be true to the
things that are. We find a way to God beginning with ordinary things, and
another way from God to us through revelation.
If we can put it this way, we seek God; that is, we seek to know the origin
and causes of things. We cannot not do this, no matter what we call it, even
atheism. The atheist tries to think himself out of an existence ordered by
someone other than himself. But in the end, he still finds himself in existence
thinking, with some concern, about where this capacity to think came from in the
first place. For he surely did not give it to himself even as he constantly uses it to
explain himself. He often finds himself reduced to give reasons for why there are
no convincing reasons. In other words, he seeks reasonably to deny reason.
We sometimes think that “Man seeks God” is the whole story. But in the
other approach, God seeks us first. This divine seeking is also true. It is not, of
course, that God does not know where we are. He seeks to catch our attention to
what He is. It all begins with the order of being itself. Philosophy ascends; faith
descends. But the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end are the
same. It is this firm position that gives both the philosopher and theologian the
confidence that they need in their efforts to fit things together. John Paul II cited
with approval the comment of Paul VI that defined Aquinas’ philosophy as the
“natural philosophy of the human mind,” of how the mind works when it is
mind.11 Though philosophical certitude is the least firm kind of certitude, still it
does arrive at some truths.
When the mind does what the mind does, what is it doing? Aquinas says in
the Summa Contra Gentiles that “almost the whole of the philosophic effort is
ordained to the cognition of God” (book I, chap. 4, §23). Such a statement is
startling. Surely we are thinking of everything else but God most of the time?
But what we find in examining anything else is that it does not leave us alone; it
does not explain everything about itself. We know there is some truth there, but
something is missing. The finiteness and temporality of our lives, as Plato said,
means that, at any moment, something can break into our world from outside of
it. It can be a delight as much as a sorrow. It can be the sight of a cat or the
sound of a bird. But it will always remind us, if we are perceptive, that we do not
yet know that in which all being as such is grounded.
In the Prologue to the third part of the Summa, Aquinas defines man as the
“horizon of all creation.”12 What might this mean? The horizon is that distant
point of our vision. It is the presence of what is beyond it there in the horizon.
What is man the horizon of? He is the horizon between God and the world. It is
through him that the world takes on its meaning, or better affirms its meaning.
The world is given to man for his dominion, as his turf, but more importantly, he
is to give to the world what it lacks by itself. What does it lack? It lacks self-
understanding.
The world, to be world, needs also to be understood. Thus it needs within it a
being that can understand it, and by understanding it, understand himself. This
capacity defines the location of man among the other creatures.13 He is the
horizon, the being whose own personal destiny hinges on how knowledge and
action relate in the world. Does he see the cosmos as a gift? Or as something
exclusively his to do what he will with it? The good of the intellect is what is
true. The good of man is what he does with this truth. He is the horizon between
the cosmos and God, because all things, including himself, are first in the Logos.

V.
To conclude, in the beginning of this chapter, I cited a passage from John Paul
II’s first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis. If we look at man’s worth and dignity,
the pope said, we cannot but be amazed. He added that we call this amazement
the Gospel, the Good News, Christianity. We are amazed that an explanation of
what we really are exists. It is not just that we are grateful: We are amazed. This
amazement identifies the Church. John Paul II adds that it also identifies every
aspect of “authentic humanism.”
“Why,” we might wonder, “is this response not more widely known?”
Indeed, why is the Church so often hated if it is so astonishing? Christ told us to
expect such reactions, no doubt. The astonishment includes the Cross. On the
Feast of St. Thomas, we see all these things come together in the quiet
realization that we have been given the means to understand God and to live in
His ways. We are the rational creatures to whom God has addressed Himself in
reason and revelation. The philosopher said: “Know thyself.” The Word made
flesh said: “Know the truth.” We can only know the first when we learn the
latter. This is what Aquinas teaches us about the openness of being. Amazement,
indeed, is the only proper response to the realization of our dignity and of our
final glory.

1 John Paul II, The Whole Truth about Man: John Paul II to University Faculties and
Students, ed. James V. Schall (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981), 218.
2 See Yves Simon, A General Theory of Authority (South Bend, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1980).
3 See Robert Sokolowski, “Soul and the Transcendence of the Human Person,” in
Christian Faith & Human Understanding (Washington, DC: The Catholic University
of America Press, 2006), 151–64; William E. Carroll, “Does a Biologist Need a
Soul?” The Modern Age 57 (Summer 2015): 17–31.
4 In Robert Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts (Richmond, VA: The John Knox
Press, 1967), 73.
5 Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1952), 20–21.
6 John Paul II, The Whole Truth about Man: John Paul II to University Faculties and
Students, ed. James V. Shall (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981), 264.
7 Ibid., 266.
8 James Boswell, Life of Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), II, 24.
9 Breviary, Saturday of the 33rd week of Ordinary Time, second reading. See Robert
Spitzer, S.J., The Soul’s Upward Yearning: Clues of Our Transcendent Nature from
Experience and Reason (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015).
10 John Paul II, “Method and Doctrine of St. Thomas in Dialogue with Modern Culture,”
Whole Truth About Man, 264.
11 Ibid., 272.
12 Ibid., 274.
13 Ibid.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

ON ISLAM AS THE ALTERNATIVE TO

CATHOLICISM

“An unbeliever is less blind or wicked than a kind of traitor towards

everlasting fidelity; in the final analysis, a non-Muslim is, objectively
speaking, an apostate. Similarly, the holy books of the other religions
[the Torah, the Gospel] are not the prefiguration of the Qur’an, but on the
contrary, they are distorted versions of an original message that
essentially coincides with it.”

—Rémi Brague, On the God of the Christians1

“There has been a tendency in the Muslim tradition of imposing its

domination. This tendency derives from the Muslim conviction that they
have the monopoly on the truth, and that the Qur’an is the perfect and
ultimate revelation.”

—Samir Kalid Samir, 111 Questions on Islam2

“Alexis de Tocqeville, commending separation of church and state,

contrasted the American constitution with Islam, a religion that ‘has most
completely confounded and intermixed the two powers … so that all the
acts of civil and political life are regulated more or less by religious law.’
Therefore, as in most armies, desertion (‘apostasy’) is a crime deserving
 of execution. This is an essential aspect of the religion, enforced in
countries where Islamists rule. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a prominent leader of
the Muslim Brotherhood, has said of the apostasy death-sentence: ‘If
they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment Islam would not exist
today. Islam would have ended with the death of the Prophet, peace be
upon him. Opposing apostasy is what kept Islam to this day.’”

—Howard Kainz,
“On the Reformation of Islam”3

I.
The general question with which this book concerns itself is, as we have seen,
the relation between Catholicism and intelligence. Throughout the modern era,
feasible and infeasible alternatives to Catholicism have been proposed beginning
with the Reformation itself. Within the ambience of what was once
Christendom, the principal alternative has become a secular humanism that has
taken many forms including liberalism, nationalism, and communism in their
varieties. In one sense, it can be said that Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900) provided
a valuable service by showing the incoherence of each of the proposed
alternatives. His “God is dead” cry was not so much an ontological position
about an inexplicable world as it was a disappointment that Christian men did
not themselves believe in their own revelation or see its long-range implications
in terms of what they could or could not know by their own reason. His disbelief
was as much nostalgia for what might exist as an intellectual conviction about
the status of the divinity.
The twentieth century was largely a confrontation with two political
ideologies, fascism and communism, movements that had some chance to
succeed in imposing their system both by force and by persuasion on much if not
all the world. At the relative demise of these two claimants—they both still have
some life in them—it seemed at first sight that the major candidate for
domination was indeed, as we have just seen, this secular humanism which had
gained control over much of the cultural, academic, and political orders at least
in Europe and America. For a short while immediately after World War II, there
was talk of a “Catholic moment” in which the lessons of the two wars
occasioned a second look at natural law and Catholic intelligence. But the
various cultural revolutions and deconstructions in the last part of the twentieth
century put classical Catholicism on the defensive, even after—especially after
—Vatican II. They opened the way for what has turned out to be a proposed
reconstruction of man himself as independent of any natural or revealed norms
internal or external to himself.
As far back as 1938, however, the English writer Hilaire Belloc, in his books
The Crusades and The Great Heresies, had postulated that the Western military
conquest of Muslim societies in recent centuries did not succeed in changing
anything basic in the Muslim mind itself. He argued that if Islam ever were to
regain the power it once had, it would start immediately to do what it sought to
do before: that is, conquer the world in the name of Allah. To many, due to the
scientific and technological backwardness of the Muslim states, this revitalized
Islamic aggression looked like a preposterous ambition. But it is taken much
more seriously today. Much of Islam has recovered from an inferiority complex
caused by its serial defeats and technical ineptness. The one constant thing
writers notice about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other such
Muslim groups today, however, is their confidence in comparison with a lack of
purpose and will in their opponents. The Islamists have a motive to conquer; the
West finds little reason for which to fight or die. The difference seems to be a
zealous faith confronting a culture that has lost its faith and energy.
If we look back on the thirteen hundred years of Islamic history, it is clear
that a policy of expansion, usually military, has propelled it into much of the
world. This expansion was made initially possible by the Byzantine and Persian
empires weakening in their sixth- and seventh-century struggles against each
other. Muslim conquests were later blunted by two famous battles, in Tours in
the eighth century and in Vienna in the sixteenth. But the African, Near Eastern,
and Balkan parts of the old Roman and Holy Roman Empires mostly remained
in Muslim control. The Muslim advance in northern India was stopped but its
results remain to this day. The Spanish Reconquista and the liberation of much
of the Balkans were the only large-scale instances of successful reversal of
Muslim rule over a once-conquered territory. Islam still retains claim to them.
The French, English, and Italian political control of many of these areas in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries introduced ostensibly Western forms of
government but they had little long-range effect on the culture itself. After
World War II, the re-establishment of Israel in the classical homelands of the
Jews brought a new political and perhaps eschatological factor into thought
about the meaning of Islam.
Almost a century after Belloc wrote, we find that the notion of Muslim
expansion into Europe and America, as well as farther into Russia, Asia, and
Africa is not at all so far-fetched as it might have once seemed. The question of
“What is Islam?” is, I want to suggest, also an issue of Catholic intelligence,
though much too seldom considered by it. If we make a mistake, even with the
best of goodwill, about what Islam is, enormous practical consequences follow.
We already see this result in the uprooting of Chaldean, Syrian, and other
ancient Christian churches that managed to survive up to now in the Near East.
While most of our attention in modern times has been directed to secular
humanism, it is becoming increasingly clear that this same humanism is itself
something that Islam vigorously opposes in the light of its own tradition. At first
sight, this agreement about what is wrong with mankind might make it appear
that Christianity and Islam have much in common. The whole ecumenical
movement, as well as modern liberalism, has been built on this premise of some
fundamental agreement. This agreement would seem to suggest a practical way
to cooperate on common things.
The question, however, is whether there are really any common things that
are not themselves subject to that voluntaristic tradition within Islam that in
principle allows any agreement or law to become its opposite. The practical
issue has roots in theoretic issues that are not always easy to sort out. Moreover,
much of Islam continues to see Christianity and its successors as its major
enemy. In this chapter, I want to inquire about Muslim thought in the light of
Catholic intelligence. At least since the Crusades, Islam has never been taken
overly seriously as a movement that might well succeed in its self-appointed
mission of subjecting all the nations to the will of Allah. It is not accurate to hold
that present day Islamic turmoil is primarily a result of some isolated movement
called terrorism which has little or nothing to do with its religion. If this view
were true, the terrorist movement would have died long ago. Daniel Pipes has
argued, though, that the way Islamic religious law became civil law was the
result of modern Muslim intellectuals who learned the Western idea of civil law
being the highest law. Thus, wherever possible, the Sharia is both civil and
religious law.4
The list of atrocities with assignable Muslim origins that have been occurring
for years now in various places in the world is extensive.5 We can expect them
to increase. Indeed, those who engineer them tell us they plan to multiply them.
Security forces in almost every country are alert to increased arbitrary use of
force and terror. The reasons for these killings by those who carry them out are
given as religions ones—blasphemy for insulting the Prophet or the Qur’an. In a
world of instant international communications, it matters little where violent
incidents happen. Killing a few or hundreds generate almost the same amount of
publicity. Such attacks are designed to make civil peace impossible. They are
meant for universal consumption. But Paris, New York, London, Rome, Munich,
Sydney, San Bernadino, or Mumbai are more attention-grabbing than slaughters
in the backwaters and deserts of Nigeria, Iraq, Sudan, or the Philippines, though
they often happen there too. The central question is this: Are these murders we
see to be attributed to Islam itself or are they the aberrations of fanatic splinter
sects?
The pope often calls for an international conference on the topic. The United
Nations includes a large number of Muslim states ready to defend their interests.
Muslim organizations vacillate between enthusiastic approval and cautious
denial of responsibility. Liberals talk of absolute free speech. Ideologues find a
non-religious reason like poverty, exploitation, or envy to be the cause.
Christians want the killings and second-class citizenship that they suffer in
Muslim countries to be stopped everywhere. Historians examine the validity of
Qur’anic claims to have a coherent origin and development. Philosophers cite
the voluntarism that Muslim thinkers have embraced. This understanding of
reality can deftly justify the jihadist position. Theologians seem loathe to analyze
the Qur’an’s claim to be a genuine revelation that specifically denies basic
Christian doctrines. German scholars slowly work on a critical edition of the
Qur’an to identify its original sources. This effort is considered blasphemy by
those who maintain that the Qur’an originates in the mind of Allah.
The President of Egypt showed concern for the reputation of Islam. At Al-
Azhar University in 2014, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said that the Islamic
religion needs to revolutionize itself. It is not an ideology. Muslims cannot hope
to kill all the other people on the planet in the name of their religion just so Allah
can rule the remainder. A two-Islam theory maintains that: first, we can
distinguish a peaceful Islam that denies violent methods but holds on to the rest
of the practices, and secondly, a radical one that justifies violence in Muslim
history and in the Qur’an. The four legal schools of Muslim tradition are brought
in. Some want to have Islam modernize or secularize itself. Others see it as a
moral force in the world reacting to the decadence of the West. All admit that
some justification for jihad is found in the Qur’an and Muslim history. A few
say that Islam is obsolete. Others maintain that the real Islam now finally is
regaining its power and does not need modern weapons to conquer and rule.6

II.
The question—“What is the Islamic religion?”—can no longer be avoided. Can
Islam be further reformed without ceasing to be what it is? Most of the pressure
for reform comes from outside Islam, often from analogies to the Protestant
Reformation. Islam actually was reformed in the eleventh century. This is the
Islam that we now live with. Even universities may seriously have to re-examine
this issue and not side-step it with diversity or multicultural evasions. While we
are familiar with attacks of violence that succeed in various places in the world,
many other attacks are prevented every day by police and other forces in the
United States, Canada, France, and Germany, and even Russia, China, Africa,
India, Australia, and other European countries.
Such attacks are not all merely accidentally related. They cannot be
attributed to something called terrorism with no relation to Islam itself. The
attacks are almost always carried out in the name of Allah. Here, however, I
intend to defend the validity of those Islamic groups that claim that their violent
efforts are religious. If we refuse to grant this fact, we are both unrealistic and
insulting to those who carry them out. We fail to understand what in fact is
happening. We have a narrow definition of religion that does not include classic
Islam.
The question Pope Benedict XVI posed in his Regensburg Lecture was
whether Allah approved vengeance or killing in the name of religion. This
remains the right question. Jihadist attacks are invariably justified in the name of
Allah. There is good reason for this. They make no sense if they are pictured as
lacking any religious justifications or motives. When political, academic, or
religious leaders insist that these attacks had nothing to do with religion, they are
wrong or equivocating. Such a view, that no relationship exists, is incoherent. It
is simply a way to avoid facing what is the fact.
One major reason (among many other related and complicated factors) that
many Muslims are now arriving in Western countries is demographic—the lack
of indigenous children, the multiplicity of Muslim children. This is another
story, but one bound up with the intellectual understanding of our era, its strange
willingness to kill off so many of its own children before they are born only to
find out when it is too late that they are needed both economically and militarily.
But calling Muslim masses flowing into Europe simply an instance of
immigration is not true. Part of it is an attempt to change, indeed control, Europe
by new methods. Islamic immigrants generally do not assimilate into a new
culture but quickly form their own enclaves from which foreigners, that is, local
police and populace, are excluded. Many Muslim thinkers have plotted out how
this process can democratically take over a given country step-by-step. The
novel Submission describes how it might happen in France.7
Political and economic theories that have analyzed large scale immigration
have not understood the religious presuppositions of those welcomed or allowed
into their midst. Muslim-originated violence requires a new political realism that
is nether totalitarian, statist, nor, especially, naïve. It must be one capable of
understanding what the young men are about, those who kill and those who
praise their bloody deeds as they kill their victims. The familiar shouts of “Allah
be praised!” at these terrible events sound like an act of praise. Many Catholics
and Christians in the hundreds of thousands have been killed to the same
familiar shout during the past years in the Middle-East, Africa, and elsewhere.
Why have we paid so little attention? The main reason is that we cannot see how
Islam is not just a religion, but it is a religion that controls state, culture, military,
economic, and family life as a submission to its purpose.
Not a few Muslims, thank God, abhor such killings, even when they
understand how they can be said to be done in the name of Allah. Everyone
would like to see this abhorrence expressed not just in terms of “it was not I” but
in terms of effective action by Muslims themselves based on sources in their
own law and philosophy, not ours. The question is whether this transformation is
possible. We know that the effort to change Islamic practice can be personally
lethal for Muslims themselves. The cohesiveness of Islam is itself based on the
fear and expectation of retaliation and death if anyone disagrees. The question
many now finally ask is: Can a non-violent Islam be imagined at all, and if so,
can it be associated with its own history and scripture?

III.
What are we to make of Islam’s being recognized, even by many of its own
members, as itself a—if not the—world problem? First, we must understand that
the Islamic State conceives and professes itself to be the true Islam. This claim is
not fictitious or far-fetched. Wherever or whenever the Qur’an is read in its
integrity, this vision of world conquest will return to inflame men’s vision. The
Islamic State’s apologists maintain that they represent the authentic
understanding of Islam’s scripture and tradition. The Islamic people who
disagree with them are, in their view, both cowards and heretics. They too will
be dealt with.
The aim of the new Caliphate is nothing less than world conquest, so that
Islamic law is accepted by all people as Allah’s will. This understanding
includes other Islamic states not yet under the control of the new Islamic
dynamism. The use of violence to accomplish this end is justified in the Qur’an
and in philosophic voluntarism that explains how Allah can at one time talk of
peace and then talk of war without any problem or need to resolve the
contradiction. Reason has no place in this system except as an instrument to
discover means to carry its goal out. The world itself and all events in it are
directly caused by Allah’s will. There are no secondary causes. This view
explains the lack of much serious science in the Islamic world once voluntarism
came to rule its mind.8 If something can always be otherwise because Allah’s
will is not limited by contradictions, no basis exists to examine anything.
Some Muslims and many non-Muslims deny that the Islamic State’s
articulated claims have anything to do with Islam. But how is it possible to
explain Islamic expansion and the atrocities connected with them as unrelated to
Islam? Probably it cannot be explained. One way to explain Islamic violence is
to maintain that it is all a just reaction to turmoil and war imposed by others on
Islam. Another way is to rely on legal interpreters who emphasize different parts
of the Qur’an that are milder. It is a matter of interpretation.
What seems to be lacking is a standard, be it of reason or natural law,
whereby the text and tradition of violence that are found in Muslim practice can
be judged as objectively wrong. As long as the whole Qur’an exists, however,
someone will always arise to imitate the Islamic State’s interpretation of the
duties of Muslims to make everyone subject to Allah. When one comes right
down to it, it seems that, on its own grounds, the legitimate interpreter of Islam
is: “Whoever’s view wins.” If the Caliphate manages to take over increasing
areas, including direct control of existing Muslim states, parts of Europe, and
more, it will be held to be Allah’s will and justified on the grounds of success.
This rationale justified original Muslim conquests of Byzantine, Persian, Hindu,
and African lands. The success is understood as Allah’s will.
What are Catholics to make of their being sudden objects of Muslim attacks?
They often do not realize that many lands that were once Christian are now
Muslim by conquest with no apparent hope of return. Many unknown and
unrecognized Christian martyrs almost daily witness to sufferings that do not
seem to convert any persecutors. Turning the other cheek or not turning it
equally results in death. Muslim jihadists do not concern themselves with any
distinction between good and bad Christians, Protestant and Catholic Christians,
Orthodox and Byzantine Christians. They are attacked and killed indifferently
and oftentimes indiscriminately.
 The Qur’an is said to be mildly sympathetic to “people of the book”—they
view Jesus as a prophet, venerate Mary, and make allowances for second-class
citizenship rather than death. These long-standing positions are hardly
encouraging. The real intellectual question concerns the validity of the Islamic
claim that the content of its revelation originates in God. The claim that the
Qur’an predates the Old and New Testaments is preposterous though it is the
only way possible to justify it in the light of the dubiousness of its evidence. The
crucifixion, Incarnation, and the Trinity are simply denied. All people are said to
be born Muslim.
Though the literature today is rapidly increasing, Christians have surprisingly
little guidance on such issues. Islam is eager and often successful in converting
Christians. It is to risk one’s life for a Muslim to be converted to Christianity.
Can a religion that contains all these issues claim to be a true revelation? Can it
be reformed without repudiating itself? These issues, it seems to me, are the
central ones that come out of the resurgence of Islam. The secular humanist
world, meantime, denies any revelation. It sees the enemy as any religion, not
just Islam. This interpretation, which goes back to classical Epicureanism, is
why the fundamental issue caused by Muslim violence is, in the face of modern
relativism and Muslim voluntarism, the recovery of reason as itself open to a
revelation that is actually addressed to it.

1 Rémi Brague, On the God of the Christians (and One or Two Others) (South Bend,
IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013), 128.
2 Samir Kalid Samir, S. J., 111 Questions on Islam (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
2008), 214.
3 Howard Kainz, “On the Reformation of Islam,” The Catholic Thing (January 30,
2016), https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/01/30/on-the-reformation-of-islam/.
4 Daniel Pipes, “The Western Mind of Radical Islam,” First Things (December 1995).
5 See Mike Konrad, “The Greatest Murder Machine in History,” The American Thinker
(May 31, 2014),
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/05/the_greatest_murder_machine_in_history.html
6 See William Kilpatrick, “The Islamization of America? Contemplating the
Unthinkable,” Catholic World Report (February 8, 2016),
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/4558/the_islamization_of_america_contemplating_the_un
7 Michel Houellebecq, Submission (New York: Farrar, 2015).
8 See James V. Schall, “On Politics and Physics: Stanley Jaki on Science in Islam,”
Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly 32, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 14–17.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

END TIMES: “THE SECRET HIDDEN FROM

THE UNIVERSE”

“The human being is not automatically well ordered just because he sets
his hope on natural well-being, even though it may be something as great
as peace on earth and just order among nations. … Only the hope for
God-given salvation, for eternal life, sets man right from within. … Not
only does it renounce an activism totally enclosed within the plane of
history and insistent that no hope is left when there is nothing more we
can do; it also renounces the mere otherworldliness of a supernaturalism
excluding history, which would abandon political humanity to fatalism.”

—Josef Pieper: An Anthology1

I.
Thoughts of a world totally organized against what Christ stood for are already
present within Scripture and the sources of revelation. St. John Damascene (d.
749), who actually once served as the head administrator to the head caliph of
Damascus, even suspected a diabolical origin of Islam. But the issue of the final
temporal end of mankind in this world is a recurring one, both from a
philosophical and an ecological perspective. Catholic intelligence does not so
much ask about man’s worldly end—that is not its primary purpose. It is
concerned with his personal transcendent end even if he dies lonely, content, or
miserable in this world as all men do. As Josef Pieper put it in the introductory
citation above, “Only the hope for God-given salvation, for eternal life, sets man
right from within.” How do we think about these things? What does it mean to
be right from within? Why are we warned against a supernaturalism that
excludes history?
The end of the liturgical year contains readings at the Mass and in the Divine
Office from Daniel, Joel, Matthew, and other sources that call attention to the
truth that time, as we know it, will end, and, it seems, not always pleasantly for
everyone. We are told that time will end at a moment when we least expect it.
Women will be working in the fields. There will be marriage and giving in
marriage, weeping and gnashing of teeth. Need we pay any intellectual attention
to these seemingly bizarre accounts? Few, if any, of us expect this end will fall
on some Last Sunday of the Liturgical Year, or on New Year’s Eve, or on
Midsummer’s Night. Many people thought that the world would end at the dawn
of the year AD 1000, others at the turn of the year AD 2000. In the Book of Joel,
the final event is scheduled to happen in the Valley of Jehoshaphat (sometimes
identified with the Valley of the Kedron). It is always pictured as a real event
even if we do not know for sure when or even where, though Jehoshaphat is a
good and dramatic possibility.
This end time is pictured not merely as an end, but as a judgment—a word
we do not like even though, if we lacked the capacity to judge, we would cease
to be human beings endowed with reason and will. It pays to be careful about
what we do not like. The phrase “Judge not lest you be judged,” was not
designed to reduce us to complete silence or to idiocy. If we made no effort to
judge the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, we would live in a
world in which everything is justified, good or evil. Some definite judgments
need to be made if we are to be at all human. Furthermore, we know not the day
nor the hour, but we should be prepared. Our lives are purposeful—full of
purposes—our own and those of others. Our lives are not given to us just so that
we can pass the time of day waiting for something to happen. If something of
ultimate importance happens in the world, for the most part, we are the ones to
make it happen. That is why we are here, to see, in the limited time we are each
given, what we will do with the being we are offered in love and freedom.
How is it possible that an account can be made of the being and actions of
each of our lives? This “all-knowing” postulates a divine intelligence. A major
purpose in denying any deeper consideration of this issue is usually to avoid
facing the suspicion that we are not completely alone. What we are and do
makes a difference, an ultimate difference. What we think and what we choose
are both known and remembered. We are at first sight tiny, passing beings, but
none of us are insignificant beings. The meaning of mankind includes what
happens in the lives that deliberately reject what is right and good. Evil in the
universe is not the result of some horrid divine plot. Nor is matter itself evil. Evil
rather is rooted in our rejection of the glorious estimation and elevation of the
kind of beings we are.
At first glance, this approach might seem fanciful. For most of us, our lives
are carried out in small and definite places, even if within large cities or states.
Yet, even science and science fiction are full of speculations about making
contact with the voices and deeds of the earthly past and also with cosmic
dwellers if our instruments are delicate enough to find them or if they are sent in
the right direction to find us. Men are reluctant to accept their loneliness and
finiteness in the universe. Is such reluctance silly? I suspect not. Is it really
solved if other finite rational beings are found or appear in the universe? Again, I
expect not.
Is it possible that an order or plan makes sense of this expectation of the “end
time”? If there is such a plan, where would we find it? And if it were explained
to us, would we be humble enough to accept it? It is at this juncture that
Christian thinking about what its Scriptures say on the subject of human purpose
comes into play. In the beginning, God did not create, from nothing, the cosmic
order that we behold, then, after seeing it sitting out there for a while, for a
couple of billion eons, wonder what He would do with it, as if he were a bit
perplexed at what He had created.
It is the other way around. What God was initially interested in was not the
cosmos itself, however magnificent and mysterious it may be. The cosmos as
cosmos knows nothing. It may be a product of God’s creative intelligence, but it
cannot be what God is, as pantheism often proposes. Christian revelation has two
basic things to tell us about God, and both of these things relate to the
wonderments of the philosophers pursuing reason as far as it could go.
The first thing we are told is that God is not monolithic or an undifferentiated
block of sameness. Otherness exists within the Godhead. So God does not need
the universe to give Him something that He lacks. How is this otherness
described to us? As related Persons in the one being, they are—Father, Son, and
Spirit. It is best described as love—Deus caritas est. God needs nothing further
than this inner life. Thus, as Plato said, we, who are not gods, and, if we are
sane, do not want to be gods, are but the “playthings” of God. This wording is
not flippant. It is a delightfully accurate word.2 It is a word that brings us to the
essential relationship that we have with God: He created us because He first
loved us, not because He needed us.
But if this understanding of God is true, the second part of Christian
revelation, that one of these Persons within the Trinity becomes true man for the
redemption of man, comes into view. God had to give us an opportunity freely to
know and love Him. That opportunity is what goes on in this world. It grounds,
makes real and visible, what happens in the cosmos. The end times close God’s
purpose or, better, complete it. This is why there must be judgment. What did we
do in our time, whenever it was? Redemption was God’s response to our not
loving Him when the love was first offered to Adam. It was one final divine
effort to enable us freely to see and love the truth. This is why it says: “And after
this, the Judgment” (Heb 9:27). This is the divine acceptance of our freedom,
however we chose to live it.

II.
More than one commentator has remarked on the rumors of war, the spate of
actual wars, earthquakes, floods, tornados, fires, terrorist bombings, volcano
eruptions, tidal waves, and other such unpleasant happenings that we have
recorded in recent months and years on this planet. In speaking to young
children, Pope Francis has said: “There are terrible, terrible, terrible things in the
world, and this is the devil’s work against God.” The pope did not let that truth
stand, of course, without counterbalancing it: “There are holy things, saintly
things, great things that are the work of God.” 3 The readings in the Liturgy for
the last weeks in the liturgical year as well as those at the beginning of Advent
recall these same topics. We are obviously expected to know them. They also
point to a solution, though not one we might expect. They speak of the times and
moments known only to God. They admonish us to be prepared. We know not
the day or the hour.
Convulsions in the sun and moon, floods, wars, earthquakes, plagues—all of
these and more—are mentioned or implied in Scripture for the end times. The
Church does not hesitate to have us read about them, always a sobering
experience, whatever we are to make of them. They must be read carefully, of
course. It is not uncommon in the history of Christianity to find folks waiting, so
far prematurely, for the end of the world based on a too-literal reading of these
passages. The date of the so-called end of the world has been, indeed, quite a
mobile one, and not something associated only with Jewish or Christian
accounts. The Book of Daniel and the Revelation have been known to be read as
an events calendar with the main show scheduled for a certain date. When the
event never comes to pass, doubt and ridicule are heaped on the whole business
of apocalypse.
Still, these readings have been pondered for centuries and centuries from the
first moments in which they were uttered and recorded. Indeed, few subsequent
decades in the past several thousand years have passed in which it was not
possible to say at the end of a given year that at least some, if not all, of these
rather unpleasant events happened around us somewhere in the world. Modern
communications make every crisis seem like it takes place in our backyard. We
are as much concerned when a crisis happens in Virginia as we are when it
happens in Japan, Hungary, Peru, or Pakistan. We are still here, of course,
though billions and billions of us have already passed in and out of mortal life
while the species of man continues and even grows in numbers. There are
considerably more of us now living and living longer and better lives on this
green planet than ever before at any one time. However many of us natural
disasters and diseases have eliminated, we go right on. Car accidents, abortions,
cancer, and even crime are cumulatively much more lethal than natural disasters.
Nonetheless, we do not have to be professional astronomers to suspect that
eventually the sun will cool, the planets will collapse, and life on this planet will
be impossible, at least if we judge solely by what we know and can reasonably
predict. Science fiction writers even want us to prepare for space travel so that at
least a remnant of our kind will survive somewhere in the cosmos. Evidently,
such a catastrophic event is not in our immediate future, so we can relax. No
doubt today more people lie awake at night worried about the world supply of
oil, itself a product of past eons, or the conditions of endangered bird species
than those worried about their immortal souls or about the upcoming burnt out
sun. Apocalyptic thought today, even when it revolves around natural disasters,
is filled with efforts to find human culprits so that we can place praise or blame
on those conceived to be the causes, or at least the causes of not being prepared,
ready, or effective. Sometimes it seems that we claim the right and power to
prevent any cosmic event or local story from bothering us. As if we have a right
to be immune from nature itself.
The advocates of the Big Bang and Expanding Universe theories, however,
have at least made us conscious that our time on earth, even as a species that
comes and goes out of existence individually and sequentially, is, though
generous, limited. Moreover, besides cosmic catastrophes which evidently will
go on whether we like them or not, we have human catastrophes which seem
also to go on in some predictable manner. The November celebration of
Veterans’ Day reminds us that human-caused disasters are often much more
lethal than natural causes. Nothing in Scripture indicates to us that both sorts of
problems will not go on as long as we remain on this earth, however much we
seek peace and justice.
We may reduce the incidence of such problems in a given time or place, but
the same occurrences seem to rise up elsewhere or at another time. Our moral
fiber is, likewise, as much challenged by natural as it is by humanly caused
disasters. Both nature and will cause enormous sufferings and call forth
considerable sacrifices and virtue, so much so that one can almost wonder
whether there is not a plan to it all. Aquinas, after all, suggested that one of the
reasons why God allows evil—whether angelic, natural, or human—is so that He
can bring forth from its results virtues and good deeds that we would not see
without them: mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, for example.

III.
Christianity holds that order is found in the universe. We ourselves participate in
this order after the manner of what we are: free and intelligent but finite beings
whose personal destiny in each case is transcendent. That is, we are not just
natural beings but we are to participate in the inner life of the Trinity. We cannot
get it out of our heads, moreover, that some relation between our moral order
and cosmic order does exist. Whatever we make of deterministic evolution
theory, we do not think that it explains either itself or the obvious kinds of
internal order we find in ourselves or in any living thing. All this cosmic activity
and variety are not going on just to be going on. Is not the very fact that we can
wonder what is going on itself a hint that this wonder is not itself solely a
product of determinism?
Scripture speaks of the end times as occasioned not so much in terms of
sidereal or planetary happenings as of human moral happenings. The
ominousness of such events even seems to be a stimulus for more human
metaphysical understanding of what is. Our relation to the world passes through
our relation to one another and to God. This relationship is where the real drama
of the universe exists. It is really why we are interested in it. It is why our
literature and lives are recounted in the form of stories. Cosmic things go on, to
be sure, whether we are virtuous or vicious. Still, as Plato already said, the just
do not always triumph, nor even frequently. The unjust seem to rule over much
of the land. We are perplexed that no one-to-one relationship exists between rule
and virtue. When Augustine titled his famous book The City of God, he intended
to teach us that this ultimate city we seek is not to be finally or directly found in
this world.
Indeed, most scriptural descriptions of end times picture a rather foreboding
scene. They indicate that mankind has gone very far in deviating from the
measures or norms that are inbuilt in its nature or in those advised by revelation.
Men are pictured as too busy with other things to notice the signs of these events
which are intended to be warnings to them. The new heavens and new earth,
which are also depicted, are not usually presented as alternative to the more
anxious descriptions but rather as what lies beyond them for those who are
faithful. In other words, both forms of end times, the one in this world, the other
in transcendence, are to work themselves out.
Too often, these depictions of end times are presented as if their primary
purpose is to frighten us into being what we ought to be anyhow. Mankind is
also warned that if it wills not to listen to what is true, not much can be done for
it. Man’s freedom will not be interfered with. It seems quite clear in Scripture
itself that those to whom these descriptions and warnings are addressed are not
going to listen or much change their ways. Such warnings are presented as
information about the way the world is, including the way human beings choose
freely to form themselves. What is true or right does not change simply because
few accept and follow it.
Why is there a world at all, a cosmos, in which the kind of beings that we are
can exist? Whatever we may think of the existence of other races of finite,
intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe besides ourselves, the fact is that
even though they might be out there someplace, we do not know of them. If
some rational beings may be out there, they are not going to be substantially
different from ourselves; though, as a race, they may have chosen differently that
we did, as C. S. Lewis implied in his space trilogy and in Narnia. That is, such
hypothetical beings still will have to explain why they exist rather than not exist.
Why are they in the places they are? What can they know? What is their destiny?
How have they chosen? They will be, in other words, finite, intelligent beings
like ourselves. They will look out and realize that they are the ones looking at
the cosmos, not the ones looked at. If we theoretically remove the intelligent
beings within the world, the universe itself sees nothing. It has no organs of
seeing or knowing except through those found in the individual rational creature,
if it exists.
In this sense, we are, on earth, probably in as good a place as any for
questions of ultimate import to be posed and answered. And they should be
asked. It is perfectly alright to wonder what we are all about. It is also sensible to
suspect that we are not merely the result of swirling deterministic accidents that
randomly came up with ourselves asking why we randomly came up. The fact
that even the random knowing is random and therefore not real knowing, is, in
fact, startling. It is more startling and less intelligible than the notion that we are
created by a God who does not, for His own being and happiness, need anything,
especially us, who are included, as what we are, in the plan of creation itself.
God had some purpose in mind in everything that He caused to come forth out of
nothingness. The imprint of this purpose is found in everything that exists,
including ourselves.

IV.
G. K. Chesterton once wrote in The Everlasting Man that, “The simplest truth
about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a
stranger on the earth.”4 Each person is an enigma unto him or herself, but this
need not be a cause of woe but of wonder. This is why Chesterton can go on to
teach us that,

Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called
laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the
universe hidden from the universe itself. …
It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common
sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is
not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against
the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle
of all reality.5

The themes of Chesterton—that man is the real stranger on earth, that he remains
homesick at home, and that he is not a natural product of nature—are the ones
that consideration of end times constantly brings up.
We notice that in Chesterton a secret remains hidden from us. Our laughter,
that great mystery of our everyday living, hints at the very shape of the universe
that is otherwise obscure yet present. The counterpoint to end times is not
nothingness, but times that do not end, what the Apostle John calls “eternal life.”
Aquinas commented on Aristotle’s notion of the eternity of the world. This
“eternal world” meant a world which repeated itself again and again down the
ages. It is not unlike some modern theories of cosmology that presuppose a
world to any existing world. Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that an eternal finite
world was possible. He was not just speaking paradoxically. But he intended to
be very precise. Aquinas meant that God as Creator might have—though, as we
know from revelation did not in fact—created a finite universe that was kept in
existence eternally, in the eternity of God. This possibility made the world
neither God nor anything more than it was. It was still dependent on God, not
itself.
What is the conclusion we draw from this penetrating remark of Aquinas on
Aristotle’s equally remarkable insight? It is that this precise world in all its
incredible particularity, a particularity that includes each of us—in our unique,
not to be repeated history, in our particular era—is the scene of a drama about
every man’s relation to God from whence he came. The cosmos itself was
created for a divine purpose that was not simply that of beholding the cosmos
itself in its admittedly incredible glory.
Man, each man, is more important than the cosmos. This fact is our dignity,
in spite of the many theories that argue or imply that we have no dignity because
the universe has no inner or external reason. Nor are we ourselves created just to
be beheld, though we are created for that too. We are created to act, to make
judgments about why we exist. We accept the fact that we are, even while
remaining finite and rational beings, infinitely more than natural beings. “It is
not natural to see man as a natural product,” Chesterton said. By his specific
creation, each man is not simply natural, but supernatural. That is, there rings in
each man’s being an end higher than that due to his nature as simply a rational
animal. This origin and destiny are really why we are, as Chesterton also said,
“homesick at home.”
We are not even well ordered, as Pieper said, even if we fulfill noble, world-
historic tasks. These may be included in what it is to love God by loving our
neighbor. But this is not the reason why each of us is created. We cannot avoid
the existence of our own personal being’s transcendent purpose even when we
deny it. That denial too is but another way of affirming that we have to choose
what we already are. The end times, then, as they are presented to us in Catholic
intelligence, are designed to remind us of what we are: strangers and pilgrims in
the universe. The universe with its tasks, whatever they be, is not itself
immediately the reason why we exist.
Only one essential drama is found in the universe. It is a drama that repeats
itself in myriads of differing ways in each human life that has ever existed on
this planet. That is the drama according to which each person must freely decide
whether the world, and with it himself in it, has no meaning, or whether what he
is given—the “now without end,” the nunc stans, as Aquinas called it—is the
reason for his existence in the first place. However posed, the decision is always
free within the context of a given life. No other way can be found in which the
highest things could be given to us and still be ours. Only the hope for God-given
salvation, for eternal life, sets man right from within. Indeed, a secret of the
universe that is hidden from the universe itself can be suspected to exist.
Only that being who can see and know the universe from within it can
suspect the existence of the laughter, the joy, and the “mirth,” as Chesterton
called it in Orthodoxy, in which the cosmos was initially conceived and made to
be. Such are the things that we learn from wondering about why we are told so
solemnly each year about end times. As Pieper put it, we must “renounce the
mere otherworldliness of a supernaturalism” that excludes history. We must
refuse the tendency to sacrifice “political humanity to fatalism or fanaticism.” In
other words, “political humanity” is not saved by the process of history. It is
saved when each person in time decides how he stands ultimately before the
Lord and is so judged.

1 Josef Pieper, Josef Pieper: An Anthology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 20–
21.
2 See James V. Schall, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (Wilmington, DE: ISI
Books, 2001).
3 Address of Pope Francis to the International Federation of Pueri Cantores, December
31, 2015.
4 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Mineola, NY: Drover Publications, Inc.,
2007), 30.
5 Ibid., 30–31.
 CHAPTER NINE

ONGOING CATHOLIC INTELLIGENCE

“Certainly, we cannot ‘build’ the Kingdom of God by our own efforts—

what we build will always be the kingdom of man with all the limitations
proper to our human nature. The Kingdom of God is a gift, and precisely
because of this, it is great and beautiful, and constitutes the response to
our hope.”

—Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, §35

“… up until that time, the recovery of what man had lost through the
expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus: herein lay
‘redemption.’ Now, this ‘redemption,’ the restoration of the lost
‘Paradise,’ is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly
discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply
denied; rather, it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private
and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow
irrelevant for the world. This programmatic vision has determined the
trajectory of modern times. …”

—Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, §17

I.
What remains to be said? In this final chapter, I want to inquire about how the
Catholic mind looks at this world itself. The phrase “this world,” of course, in
the Gospel of John can mean all that is opposed to God. And opposition to God
can and does happen in this world even when it is called a right or a freedom and
enforced by the state. In one sense, this opposition is what the famous modern
project is about: the systematic erection of a world that deliberately excludes
God or anything attributed to Him. Benedict XVI indicated in the two citations
that begin this chapter just what the basic issues are. The world is a gift for us to
do something with—make it habitable and serviceable for man while he lives in
this world.
This world, as God created it in the beginning, is also the arena in which
each person’s transcendent purpose plays itself out. Much in this world is worth
doing and we ought to do it. Others have pointed out that since man was created
in a garden in which nature served his needs, it is man’s purpose to reestablish
the conditions of the garden in this world. There is some sense to this
understanding. The world can and ought to be made a beautiful place that serves
man’s needs through his own work and intelligence. God had no reason to create
a world in which He did all the work and fashioning. Man is placed in the world
to rule it for the end for which he, man, was created.
Catholicism, in recognizing the transcendent nature of man, is not as such an
exclusively other-worldly religion. Indeed, it is very much a this-worldly
religion. The Benedictine motto—to work and to pray—recognizes this unified
relation. Catholicism accepts the fact that God did not reveal to man everything
that he needed for his survival and well-being. What He did was to give man
intelligence connected to his body through his hands and his memory whereby
he could work out what he needed for himself through his own labor and mind.
The New Testament was not a tractate in how to organize an economy, a polity,
or an art gallery. It specifically said that this was not what it was about. But in
affirming this distinction, it did not follow that just any way that we organized
ourselves would be acceptable or would work. Just as there were virtuous and
vicious ways to live, so we had good and bad regimes, good and bad economies,
good and bad education. We can usually figure out the differences between them
by ourselves. We really do have minds, though they are influenced by our wills
and passions.
Catholicism is famous for emphasizing the need to look after the poor and
weak. Indeed, almost every modern government, reflecting however vaguely this
Christian inspiration, will claim that its purpose and methods have the same
goal. Likewise, most modern political ideologies present themselves, in the
name of social justice, as ways to deal with the poor and downtrodden. The
question obviously arises about how best to meet such requirements. Good
intentions do not necessarily produce good works. Here is where radical
differences enter. They are usually related to a controversy about what man is
and ought to be. We have enough experience to know that not everything works
for such noble ends. We also have the somewhat new issue of the preservation of
the earth’s resources for future generations as a limitation of what we can do for
anybody. Benedict noted how easily such concerns can deviate from or confuse
themselves with the transcendent end of each man as such.
Catholicism does not locate the final end of each person or the human
species itself in this world. This location is not intended to imply that the world
is somehow bad or evil in itself. Indeed, Catholicism does not think that the
species man—that is all men abstracted into a multi-faceted conceptual unity—is
anything more than an idea or mental form that has no historical existence
outside the mind, though it does exist in the mind after the manner of mind.
What bears human reality is the individual person in his real existence. It is this
existence that, in each separate case, is ordered to everlasting life. But it is so
ordered through the life of each person in this world, in whatever the era or
polity in which he finds himself. When St. Augustine spoke of the City of God,
he was referring primarily to that final gathering of each person within the same
community itself composed of distinct and individual persons, all and each
ordered in principle to the inner life of the Godhead.

II.
In thinking of human life on this planet, we can ask two sorts of questions. The
first is a query about God: is the earth adequately created for the purpose for
which it was designed? The second is this: can men reasonably figure out how
they might provide for one another while they are, for their limited number of
days, here on earth? In my view, the answer of Catholic intelligence to both of
these questions is affirmative.1 The earth with its given riches provided by its
cosmic origins is capable of providing for man, which is its real purpose.
Secondly, we do know how to provide and distribute what human beings need.
Whether this knowledge attains its object is itself an issue of will and
intelligence. It takes time and genius, and can often fail precisely because of the
dignity and freedom of man’s own will and responsibility for his own good and
destiny.
Men can thus choose both not to know and not to put into effect what they do
know. They can err. They can be lazy, vicious, ignorant, and envious. They can
also learn. One thing must constantly be kept in mind. Human beings can
achieve their transcendent purpose whether they live in a good or bad regime, a
poor or prosperous one. Likewise, they can lose their souls in the best as well as
in the worst of circumstances and everywhere in between. In the Catholic
understanding of things, the divine purpose is in fact being carried out in all
existing regimes and specifically in the souls of each of those beings conceived
of women in this world.
How do we think about the earth in its capacity to sustain human life? The
phrase “objection sustained” comes from the law court—a judge agrees with a
lawyer’s objection to procedure. The judge’s “sustaining” guarantees that the
trial follows established rules whereby justice is best achieved. Today, in an
enormous literature, what are to be “sustained” are not legal procedures but the
supposed rules that keep this planet viable for man down the ages. The concern
is that by using the riches of the given earth, men will exhaust its capacity to
support themselves. This assumption implies that we must, for their own good,
acquire control over men and the uses that they make of the earth.
Almost all universities today have sustainability courses. We have Earth
Days. We observe ecological, environmental, earth-warming, ocean-saving, anti-
fossil fuel, and sundry species-preserving movements. All seek to sustain the
earth. Theologians and philosophers write books about it. Biologists and animal
lovers find that this concern justifies their existence and income. Economists
cannot decide whether it helps or hinders the purpose of wealth production for
everyone. Most governments pour money into this noble effort to prevent the
earth from going under.
More perceptive thinkers, however, suspect that sustainability is probably the
most useful ideological tool ever invented. It brings everything—especially
messy human beings, who are the real problem—under direct state and
international jurisdiction. It makes Marxism look like child’s play when it comes
to absolute control of man and society. It proposes an inner-worldly good higher
than the good that individual human beings have for their purpose.
At the World Bank in 1994, the Norwegian economist, Geir Asheim, thus
defined sustainability as: “A requirement of our generation to manage the
resource base such that the average quality of life that we ensure ourselves can
potentially be shared by all future generations. … Development is sustainable if
it involves a non-decreasing quality of life.” 2 That is quite a definition. The key
concept, besides the ominous “requirement,” is that our generation is to manage
future generations. For what end? And by what authority? The answer is so that
future generations will potentially be able to live as the average “we” lives
today.
Let us suppose that the generation of 1800 BC or AD 1200 had acted
responsibly on the same philosophical premises as those proposed for this
generation. If they did, we would still be happily enjoying life as they did in
1800 or 1200 (AD or BC). Is that really a desirable thing? Is there not something
terribly dangerous about the assumption of responsibility over future
generations?
The next question is this: Just how do we know how many future generations
will need our managing—ten, a hundred, a thousand, infinite? Which generation
are we saving resources for? Or are we saving for all subsequent eons? Of
course, sustainable means, from now on, that we all start out with the same
resource and technology base. Resources are not to be used lest they be used up
by our greedy generation. This is a formula for stagnation and a misuse of the
purpose of resources.
Such thinking assumes that the present limited intellectual and technical base
that we have now is thrust on future generations. Contemporary men evidently
think that they know enough to decide what future generations will want, need,
or be able to do. Future generations are mandated to be content with what we
have now as if somehow nothing superior can come along. What if the only way
that we can guarantee the well-being of future generations is for us not to impose
our limited ideas of sustainability on them? Such thinking is not as neutral as it
pretends to be. It is in fact quite totalitarian.
When I look at this sustainability issue, moreover, I detect an apocalyptic or
gnostic root to it. The knowledge of the elite ecologists will save us. Augustine
would have been amused with a generation that thought it could engineer the
future of mankind on this basis.
The root of the sustainability mission, I suspect, is the practical denial of
eternal life. Sustainability, in effect, is an alternative to lost transcendence. It is
what happens when suddenly no future but the present one exists. The only
future of mankind comes to be seen as an ongoing planet orbiting down the ages.
It always does the exact same boring thing. This view is actually a form of
despair. Our end is the preservation of the race down the ages as long as
possible; it is not personal eternal life.
Sustainability implies strict population control, usually set at about two or
three billion. Excessive numbers must be eliminated for the good of future
generations. Sin and evil imply misusing the earth, not our wills in our relation
to ourselves and each other. What we personally do makes little difference.
Since children are rationed or even produced artificially as needed, whatever we
do sexually is irrelevant. It has no real consequence in this life, the only one that
exists.
Some talk of saving the race by fleeing to other planets. This solution leaves
the existing billions who cannot get on the space ships stuck here. The planet
will disappear as the sun cools. So the final meaning of the human race was that
it sustained itself as long as possible. What is missing from this whole scenario
is the notion of man’s dominion, which many claim is the cause of the problem.
The world was not created for man’s use. It was created that man not use it so
that it lasts down the ages for peoples yet unknown.
The earth and its resources, including its chief resource, the human mind, are
given for the purposes for which each individual was created. Enough resources,
including human mind and enterprise, are given for man to accomplish his
purpose. When this purpose is accomplished, no more resources are needed. In
this sense, the revelational doctrine that this world will end is the one that frees
us from the dismal sustaining cycle that presumably goes on and on until it just
stops.
No doubt, while here, we should sustain the world as a garden the best we
can. But, as in the beginning, our key problems will not arise from the abundant
garden itself or from our planetary resources. They originate in our wills. The
garden does not exist for its own sake but for what goes on in it. That was the
real point of the Adam and Eve narrative. This confusion of placing the earth
higher than man is what is wrong with sustainability. This inversion of ends has
made mankind subject to his own ideological theories as never before in history.

III.
Let us grant then that the purpose of the earth is not merely to sustain itself for
some future down the ages. Two hundred years ago, no one much thought that
the planet could support a population of the present seven billion. The reason is
that no one could imagine what man, in thinking about the earth, could do with
it. Likewise we cannot imagine just how abundant and productive the world is
because we do not yet know what tools and ideas we will have to work with two
or twenty centuries into the future, should we last that long. Thus, we find it
possible and sensible today to talk of meeting most of mankind’s material needs.
We see that perhaps, in giving us minds and hands on a planet with rich natural
resources, God did provide for us. But He did so in a way that included and
depended upon our moral understanding of what we are and what the cosmos is.
In a rather enigmatic remark, Robert Cardinal Sarah said: “Those who want
to eradicate poverty make the Son of God a liar. They are mistaken and lying.”3
On first reading this passage, most people would think that eradicating poverty is
a good idea. Evidently, since Christ said the poor would always be with us, the
passage might be interpreted to mean that we should not work to eradicate
poverty. The scriptural meaning is probably best understood this way: No matter
how rich or poor a society may be, someone, perhaps many, will always feel
comparatively poor. And even if the poor have some income or housing, it is
usually not adequate or as good as it might be. So there will always be
something to do. The idea that it is wrong to seek to reduce or eliminate poverty
seems unreasonable and against the spirit of giving a cup of water or a cloak to
the needy as we are admonished to do. If we can provide water or coats to
everyone through our technical and economic systems, we obviously should do
so.
The English economist E. F. Schumacher (d. 1977) explained the real
situation: “The economic problem … has been solved already: we know how to
provide enough and do not require any hostile, inhuman, aggressive technologies
to do so. There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.”4
But there are still problems that are not economic but moral and political. These
latter are the real causes of issues dealing with poverty. That is, we may know
how to produce and distribute enough for everyone. But for various religious,
ideological, moral, or technical reasons, we choose not to do so. In the latter
case, we would still have the poor among us. I suspect this understanding is
more in line with what Christ had in mind when He spoke to us of the poor being
always with us.
In chapter 19 of Luke, we have the account of Zacchaeus, a wealthy tax
collector in Jericho. As he seems to have been short in stature, he climbs a
sycamore tree in order to have a better look at Jesus who was passing by. I once
read an alternate interpretation. It argued that Zacchaeus climbed the tree
because Jesus was short. The tax-collector just wanted to peer over the heads of
normal-sized people blocking his view of Christ. In any case, Jesus spotted him
in the tree and told him to climb down. Jesus meant to stay at his house that day.
Jesus assumed the man’s hospitality and generosity.
When they all arrived at Zacchaeus’ home, “everyone began to murmur.”
What was this Jesus doing fraternizing with sinners, they asked. Tax-collectors
were evidently both rich and in a sinful trade by working for the Romans. The
Apostle Matthew seems to have had the same problem. But Zacchaeus stood his
ground. He gives half of his belongings to the poor. If he defrauded anyone, he
paid back four times the cost. Jesus tells him that this day salvation has come to
Zacchaeus’ house. “The Son of Man came to search out and save what was lost”
(Lk 19:10).
If we look at that passage, several issues seem clear. If Zacchaeus was not
wealthy, he could give nothing to the poor. He was not only just but generous
and kindly. He gave back more than he needed to return. Salvation could come
to a man who was rich—even to a wealthy sinner. He was still rich even after
giving half of his possessions away. The issue was not whether he was rich or
not, but what he did with his riches. Christ did not request that he give the rest of
his income away to become himself poor. Nor did He ask him to find a better job
that did not have the taint of sin. Likewise, He did not ask Zacchaeus, like the
other tax-collector, Matthew, to come and follow Him as an apostle. We are
mindful here of the parable of the talents in which the only one reprimanded was
the man with one talent who did not invest it to produce more wealth.5

IV.
Certain strands of Christian social thought often seem to want the poor about so
that politicians, social workers, or religious groups could have some justification
for their lives and theories. An antagonism arises between those who hold that
poverty can be reduced or largely eliminated and those who need it to justify
their ideology. The poor themselves, as far as I am able to see, given a choice, do
not want to be poor. Indeed, no one should want anyone to be poor unless the
alternative is something evil. There is also a distinction between sheer destitution
and just not having a lot of money or goods in comparison to others. The poor
are realists, not romantics. They need not be poor just to accommodate
themselves to someone’s faulty idea about economics or politics.
Christ’s admonition that the poor would always be with us did not mean that
God wanted everyone to be poor, such that the efforts to live in more abundance
would constitute an evil. Rather, it was a statement of probability, of the
likelihood that men, because of sin, ignorance, and laziness, would never take all
the means necessary not to be poor. Men had to learn both theoretically and
practically how not to be poor. They were not given everything in the beginning.
They were challenged by their condition to find for themselves a better way.
They really had something in this world to which they needed to attend.
This learning how to increase the wealth of nations, to use Adam Smith’s
famous phrase, is the way that God respected human dignity. This endeavor is
what the history of economics is about. The last thing that the poor want is to be
poor. They want to be not poor. And to accomplish this goal, men had to figure
it out anew each generation or to learn how to be not-poor from the rich who had
learned it before them. They also had to learn what did not work to alleviate
poverty. Like any other human accomplishment, men have had to learn how not
to be poor and then put what they have learned into operation. Vows of poverty
were fine, but they were not intended for everyone. Their point was the primacy
of the Kingdom of God. The vows of poverty were designed to be a way to free
men for other tasks besides the production and distribution of goods.

V.
When we read admonitions to aid the poor, their very presupposition is that
someone is not poor. If everyone were poor and no one knew anything different,
the notion of not being poor would never make much sense. If we distributed
everything that the rich owned and simply gave it to the poor, moreover,
everyone in a relatively short time would end up poor.6 We need a dynamic
context of innovation and exchange for continued wealth production to occur.
The reason the poor are poor is not because the rich are rich. So in my reading,
Cardinal Sarah seems uncharacteristically confused about this topic. The world
has in recent centuries and decades taken great strides in alleviating poverty for
everyone. No one else thinks this is a bad thing.
Most of modern poverty, in any case, is caused by governmental or
ecological policies and ideological presuppositions that limit growth and
exchange. As Schumacher said, we know how to solve the economic problem.
We have not figured out how to solve the human and political problem. But the
two, economic and political, are not the same. It is one thing to know how to
produce wealth, as John Mueller says, another thing to know what to do with it
once it is produced.7 There are many ways to keep people poor, but only one
general way to make everyone not poor.
The central issue is not the dignity of the actual poor or the dangers of riches.
These are usually agreed-on foundations. Cardinal Sarah went on to observe:
“The Church must not fight against poverty, but, rather, wage a battle against
destitution, especially material and spiritual destitution.” 8 It became clear that
we were dealing more with a semantic than a real problem. Sarah distinguished
between destitution, which he wanted to be rid of, and poverty, which would be
different from destitution. To advocate that everyone should have food, clothing,
shelter, jobs, adequacy of normal things, this is here called poverty. Others
would call the same thing getting rid of poverty.
Sarah also recalled the two versions of beatitudes—“Blessed are the poor”
and “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Many examples of saints and other
Christians over the centuries have shown that the rich man can also be poor in
spirit. An affluent person can use his wealth generously to help others. Many of
our educational, health, and artistic institutions come from this generosity.
Socialist theories want to concentrate all wealth in the hands of the state so that
nothing would escape its control. That happened in Guinea, something Sarah
recounted as a learning experience for him.
Aristotle thought it best that most people were not too rich or not too poor.
This middle-class position was the better for everyone—a view important in
American tradition. “The poor will always be with us” was not a command not
to be rich or not to strive for increasing wealth for everyone. The virtuous rich
could do many things for everyone else. Those who in fact contributed more
deserved more. If they did not receive it, either in wealth or in honors, they
would cease striving and everyone would lose. We need those who are better
than others in most things, including wealth formation. A common good is
precisely a good that comes about when everyone is doing what he can do.
Common good is not a theory to make everyone equal so that no differences of
talent, energy, goodness, or discipline make any difference. It is rather a reality
in which these very differences are allowed to develop for the good of everyone.
If everyone does or has the same thing, nothing much happens to anyone.

VI.
“The Son [of God] wanted to be poor so as to show us the best path by which we
can return to God,” Cardinal Sarah observes. “The ‘zero poverty’ program
liquidates and physically eliminates the vows of religious and priests.” 9 Just
why this might be so is a mystery to me. I have argued in “The Christian
Guardians” that the religious vows were never intended for everyone. Religious
life has never meant a life of planned destitution.10 The Church has required
religious orders to have enough means to care for their members.
Again, we equivocate here on the word poverty. But the establishment of
economic and social systems in which men and women could be adequately
cared for largely through their own efforts and enterprise, in which many would
be well taken care of, is not an evil. Many people do want to be rich. But they
also want the title for it to be justified by their positive contribution to its
creation. Most people are content with a normal life. The rich provide a valuable
lesson in society, namely that there are legitimate ways not to be poor. The
spiritual danger of wealth is well recognized, but the solution need not be to
deny a middle-class way of life for most people, a way that is neither destitute
nor of great wealth.
“The Son of God loves the poor; others intend to eradicate them. What a
lying, unrealistic, almost tyrannical utopia!” 11 I find this rhetoric, I must
confess, uncomfortable. I cannot imagine how Christ’s love of the poor was
intended to keep men poor. More likely, it was intended to incite them not to be
poor. That was part of loving them, the purpose of giving help to the needy. But
again, when we recall Cardinal Sarah’s own distinction between destitution and
poverty, we see that he really does want to eliminate the destitution that most of
us would call poverty. If we read his sentence this way—“The Son of God loves
the destitute; others intend to eradicate them”—the confusion would become
more clear. Christ also loves the destitute, as do we. But we do not want them to
be destitute, that is, poor, if we can help it—and we can.
“We must be precise in our words. The language of the UN and its agencies,
who want to suppress poverty, which they confuse with destitution, is not that of
the Church of Christ. The Son of God did not come to speak to the poor in
ideological slogans. The Church must banish these slogans from her language.
For they have stupefied and destroyed peoples who were trying to remain free in
conscience.” 12 This was Cardinal Sarah’s parting shot on the topic of poverty.
The issue seems to come down to who is using precise language. When it
comes to questions of abortion and life, many UN agencies utilize ideological
slogans. But I think, on hearing the distinction between destitution and poverty,
most people would say that they are both speaking of the same thing. Modern
economics and institutions are not, at their best, trying to eliminate or destroy
either destitute individuals or poor persons. Rather, they are trying to bring them
to a situation in which they have an adequacy and abundance of goods with
which to pursue the cultural and familial lives that are open to them and proper
to all human dignity.
In the broad sense, Catholic intelligence includes the things that can be
otherwise: our free actions, the structures of our polities, and the way we do
things. In recent decades the primary threats to Catholicism within its own
historical culture have come from practical issues about what man is and how he
should live. Once the theoretic understanding of man’s transcendence is denied,
what is left are initiatives that seek to change man himself, to place him within
this world, to engineer his being so that he can be whatever he wants to be. The
result is something that is less and less human in any meaningful sense. As we
have seen all the way through this book, these are the consequences, logical
enough, of denying human reason and the revelation that is addressed to it. In
other words, if we want to look at what is happening to us, the best place to look
is in that mind that is Catholic, in the relation between Catholicism and
intelligence.

1 See James V. Schall, Human Dignity & Human Numbers (Staten Island, N.Y: Alba
House, 1971); Religion, Wealth & Poverty (Vancouver: Frasier Institute, 1990); On
Christianity & Prosperity (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute, 2015).
2 Geir B. Asheim, “Sustainability: Ethical Foundations and Economic Properties”
(policy research working paper, The World Bank, Policy Research Department,
Public Economics Division, May 1994),
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/pt/605011468739497097/pdf/multi0page.pdf.
3 Robert Cardinal Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith with Nicholas Diat
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015), 141.
4 E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper Colophon, 1970),
140. See also John Mueller, Redeeming Economics: Recovering the Missing Element
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2014); James V. Schall, On Christians & Prosperity
(Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute, 2015).
5 See James V. Schall, “The Capitalist Parable,” The Catholic Thing (September 7,
2010), https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2010/09/07/the-capitalist-parable/.
6 See James V. Schall, “On Redistributing Wealth,” in On Christians & Prosperity
(Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute, 2015).
7 John Mueller, Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2014).
8 Robert Cardinal Sarah, God or Nothing, 141.
9 Ibid., 142.
10 James V. Schall, “The Christian Guardians,” The Distinctiveness of Christianity (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 185–99.
11 Robert Cardinal Sarah, God or Nothing.
12 Ibid., 142–143.
 CONCLUSION

“TRUTH COMES BY CONFLICT”

“All social life is primarily conditioned by the mode of thought under

which a society lives; its morals, its intellectual habits, its strong tradition
of behavior, all these proceed from the religious doctrines under which it
has been formed. … For upon the maintenance and increase of the
Church, the life of our civilization depends. There are apparent in all art,
literature and morals many forerunners of collapse. Whether we shall
avoid it or succumb, none can tell.”

—Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic, 19311

“… to them we did not yield submission even for a moment, that the
truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.”

—Galatians 2:5

The paradoxical title of this conclusion is taken from the motto that appeared
on the title page of Hilaire Belloc’s 1931 book Essays of a Catholic. That truth
might come by conflict may not immediately occur to us, though St. Paul said
pretty much the same thing to the Galatians. We think that everything is settled
by dialogue, calm reasoning, or, when all else fails, by power. Conflict arises
when both sides of an issue realize that something basic is at stake, that our ideas
do make a difference. Everyone appeals to the rightness of his position. Such an
appeal implicitly presupposes the existence of a standard or measure according
to which the truth of the issue might be achieved. Yet, if we agree on everything
about the whole range of ideas and practices that men espouse, we stand for
nothing. It is what we stand for, more than anything else, that defines us. This
book is written with a certain confidence both in reason and revelation. It is not
merely that they belong together in a coherent relationship but that their rigid
separation unbalances and corrupts both not merely in logic but in the way we
live.
Already in the 1930s, Belloc saw many forerunners of collapse in our
culture. He was an insightful man. The ideas that corrupt us are often very
ancient, suddenly or slowly renewed. The separation of the culture from its
religious roots is almost complete as the twenty-first century goes on. All
religions, no matter how distinct one is from another, are now said to be the
locus of modern ills. The mantra goes: “Get rid of religion to get rid of our
woes.” Though it has always had turmoil, the Church itself no longer seems to
many to be as stable in its affirmations as it once did. Controversies are no
longer over fine points of ritual or manners. They are over the very structure of
reality, of human life, or of the family. We doubt if an intrinsic nature of man
can be found. And, if such a thing as nature does exist, we doubt if it is at all
binding on us, even if it is backed by revelation. We doubt our very capacity to
know what is true.
The spirit of this book is benign—neither triumphal nor arrogant. It first
wants to see. It is grounded, nonetheless, in an Augustinian realism that does not
hesitate to acknowledge and think about the evils that men bring upon
themselves. It is proper to the mind to name what is evil as evil and what is good
as good. And it takes uncommon courage to do so. Perhaps we have presented a
minority opinion in these chapters. But it is one that nonetheless claims to make
sense of reality, of what is. Truth can come by conflict, though in reflective
silence and calmness also. The varying claims of truth make this conflict often
unavoidable as the claims are contradictory if we see them in their full meaning.
The Gospels themselves uncomfortably warn us that the truth to which they
attest will often be hated in the world. They will often be rejected by most men.
Nothing in past or contemporary experience would lead us to suspect that this
warning about frequent conflict and persecution is not itself a truth. That is to
say, conflict arises when things that seemingly are accepted or unchallenged are
suddenly transformed into causes that contradict each other. Conflicts mean that
something is at stake. Only blind men deny it.
The wars and conflicts of the world are generally first fought out in the
minds of the learned before they later appear incarnate in the streets and
pathways of this world. A book bearing the title Catholicism and Intelligence is
obviously aware of this relation between ideas and the lives of nations and
peoples. We began with the initial reflection that the greatest service that we can
offer to our neighbor is to tell him the truth. We can offer him other things, but
this comes first. We cannot share what we do not have. We conclude from this
that the condition of our own souls will stand behind all telling of truth to others.
The virtue of courage is often first manifest when we must stand for a truth on
which all other truths rests.
Thus, we began with an unavoidable question—“Do I or do I not exist?” The
words I and exist mean something. We are not dreams or ideas. We have dreams
and ideas, no doubt, but it is each of us who has them. They do not have us. We
know there is something passing about us. We have only a certain number of
years to decide the most basic things and how we stand to them. We know that
many human beings die before birth or shortly after. Others never reach
maturity, yet these are still our kind, each one of them. It seems like some among
us, as many as are willing and able, need to illuminate or explain the nature and
meaning of our existence. This endeavor is not a frivolous side issue to what we
are, but reaches its core.
The human mind is a powerful instrument. It relates us to all that is not
ourselves. It makes us aware of ourselves; or better, through it, we become
aware of ourselves. It can, indeed, sometimes make it appear that nothing, or
nothing of much importance, exists. Whether it can do this without contradicting
itself is, as we saw, doubtful. And why might someone want the world not to
exist? It is because he might want to do something other than what the world and
his being within it are for. We can understand both of these things, the world and
our desire to substitute our thoughts for what it really is.
One of the chief ways to defend existence is to imagine it out of existence or
imagine it structured in a different way to suit ourselves. Literature of all nations
is replete with such efforts. It is a sign of constant searching. One of the themes
running through this book is the idea that the world is better made than any of
the alternatives that we might concoct as substitutes for it. In thinking this world
out of existence, we end up with the suspicion that perhaps it is, as such, well-
made after all. The problems that we confront are not primarily about the
structures of the world but about our willingness to accept them as they apply to
us.
Catholicism has a point. It is this: We can arrive at a basic understanding of
what we are about in this world through our reason, which includes our
transcendent purpose. The cosmos, which has a real existence, was not created
for itself. It was created for man. But it was not created just for man’s activities
on this earth, though these are included in its very purpose. Indeed, we manifest
how we stand to our transcendent purpose—which is to participate in the inner
life of the Trinity—by how we deal with one another during the time we are
given, a limited time for each of us. We add Roman to Catholic to emphasize
that revelation is not opposed to reason, but directed to it. Roman Catholicism is
and must be an intellectual thing, while attending to everything else.
In a sense, Roman Catholicism is not best understood as a religion but as a
revelation. A religion is what binds us to God insofar as we can ascertain this
relationship by our reason. The Pagans had religion in this sense. The virtue of
religion is an aspect of natural justice. It refers to what we owe to why we are.
We know that we do not cause ourselves to be or to continue to be. In addition,
Catholicism maintains that a certain specific life, a certain intelligence—that of
Christ and through Him of the triune God—took care to instruct us more clearly
on what exactly our purpose was. Revelation was not designed to tell us
everything we needed to know to get along in this world. We were given the
honor of figuring out by ourselves most of the things we need to know about our
earthly lives. Most of these we had to learn the hard way, by trial and error.
Eventually we could come to be able to purify our drinking water, to construct
computers, or to develop medicines by ourselves. But no doubt this figuring out
was often replete with confusions about our ultimate purpose.
Hence, we took a look at the universal humanism that is the major alternative
to Christianity within the remnants of the old Western culture. The openness to
the whole of reality meant that we cannot just exclude evidence from reason or
revelation as if it did not exist. That we can exclude some evidence is itself an
unreasonable position. The notion of an inner-worldly eschatology that would
conceive human purpose in ecological terms also needs to be seen as yet another
of the numerous efforts to embed the transcendent end of man within the
confines of this world. But what all these alternatives do is postpone down the
ages a decision that every existing person must make while he lives in a definite
time and in a definite place. The ongoing generations of men are not sacrificial
to each other. That is, a finite inner-worldly cosmic cycle, seen as doom or glory,
does not constitute the answer to “Why do I exist?”
Though it claims to be a revelation of sorts, Islam is a religion. It lays claim
to all of mankind. It controls approximately a fifth of the world’s area and
population. It has suddenly become dynamic—that is, it has begun to expand
into areas once thought closed to it, especially in Europe and America.
Catholicism has given relatively little thought and attention to Islam except
when large areas of what were once Christian lands fall under its sway. I have
included Islam in a consideration of Catholicism and intelligence because it does
maintain both that it is the true and final revelation of Allah and that the Jewish
and Christian Scriptures are but distorted versions of the original Qur’an that
exists primarily in the mind of Allah. Islam has been mostly impervious either to
dialogue or to missionary efforts largely because it is a closed society
maintaining complete control over all aspects of life and enforced often by the
death penalty for its violation.
But Catholic intelligence is first interested in the truth factor of Islam. Is the
account it gives of itself credible? Can the Qur’an be what it says it is? Can the
philosophic grounding in voluntarism that Islam has to use to explain the
contradictions of its own practices and theories be at all coherently maintained?
Part of the reason that Catholicism has seen the expansion of Islam is because it
has not really considered it in its thought and as it manifests itself in its actions.
As a result, it has dealt with Islam as if it is just another religion or philosophy
that is essentially open to common sense and rational discourse, as well as
science and a free public life. Dealing with Islam is probably the most pressing
issue facing both Europe and America in the rest of the century. Islam is poised
to expand into a good part of the world. This expansion in large part is rooted in
a failure to understand what it really is and stands for, an issue, again, of
intelligence.
In considering the end times that so often come up in Scripture and Liturgy,
we have an opportunity to sort things out. In the last chapter the emphasis is on
the legitimate and necessary things that our temporal life in this world is about.
It is noted again and again that politics ought to be limited to what we can
expect. But it easily turns into a utopianism that promises to solve all human
problems. Thus, it is important to distinguish what can and ought to be done
from what cannot. We can find, no doubt, a religious element in politics, one that
confuses this world and the next. Usually this confusion arises when men are not
clear themselves about the location of their final end. This final end is always to
be seen not as what happens to political or even religious institutions, but what
happens to individual human beings with names and a personal record that
accounts for their lives. The Catholic intelligence is one that never forgets the
proper location of the City of God and of whom it is composed.
 This book, in conclusion, is not a history of philosophy or theology, nor is it
a book of virtues, or economics, or politics. Rather it is a book that directs our
minds to what we are in our existing being, in that personal being we find
ourselves, on reflection, to be. One of the underlying themes of this book has
been what I call the delight of mind when it is itself aware of what is and of what
is directed to our own intelligence. The remarkable thing is that the revelation
that constitutes Catholicism itself contains an intelligence that recognizes the
intelligence that we ourselves possess. We make this intelligence active in
thinking of the ultimate questions of our personal being and that of our kind in
this world, a world that itself, on careful examination, contains signs of an
intelligence that literally had us in mind.
The anthropic principle that the cosmos was designed with surprising
mathematical and physical laws in order that we might exist leaves us with the
central point of this book: namely, the purpose of our own individual existence is
contained in the order of things itself. This purpose is the eternal life we each are
to live. The drama and risk of the universe and, indeed, of God is how each of
the free creatures responds to the purpose of his existence. This response, as
Augustine said, constitutes two cities, not just one. This division occurs because
we are indeed free in our creation. So when we finally ask ourselves, “Why do I
exist?” we are no longer wholly oblivious to what is at stake. This awareness is
our glory or our doom. In the end, it is better that this world exist rather than it
not exist. Without this preferment, none of us could be in the first place.

1 Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931), 312–313, 319.
 APPENDIX

ON READING AND CATHOLIC

INTELLIGENCE: A HOPELESSLY
INCOMPLETE BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Every cranny of reality is illuminated by his [Thomas Aquinas’]

reflections, and his address is universal. Persuaded that Sacred Scripture
and Apostolic Tradition are true and reasonable, he writes as a Christian,
yet not a few atheists consult his writings assiduously; his works are too
penetrating for anyone safely to ignore.”

—J. Budziszewski, University of Texas, Commentary

on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law (Cambridge
University Press, 2014), xix

“What matters, according to these sociologists, is not that he [man] uses

his mind to distinguish what is true from what is false; what matters is
what he thinks, whether true or false. What matters is what we think,
even if what we think is nonsense. What matters, most critically, is that
the student comes to know and embrace an understanding of freedom
that is independent of any transcendent truth. This is the sociological path
to nihilism, a path down which we have already made great ‘progress’
over the past century or so. Implicitly, man is all that matters because we
are the creators, not the creatures, and so we are free to create ourselves
as we wish, and make ourselves what we will. God is dead after all, and
we are in charge.”
 —Clifford Staples, University of North Dakota,
“Down the Sociological Road to Nihilism,” Crisis
Magazine (October 2, 2015)

“But there was one aspect of him [man] that Chesterton characteristically
emphasized: ‘Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful
madness called laughter, as if he had caught sight of some secret in the
very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.’”

—Ian Ker, Oxford University, G. K. Chesterton:

An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 518

I.
To appreciate this particular Appendix, the reader should begin by carefully
reading the three introductory passages above, noting who wrote them, where
they are from, and what each selection actually says. This book does not have a
bibliography in the normal sense of that term. But it does invite its reader to look
at some things to read that carry forward what we have been considering: the
abiding truth of Catholic intelligence. Catholic intelligence is not ordinarily
focused on what a given pope might think, affirm, or write, however wise this
source may prove to be. Catholicism has a many-faceted tradition that includes
what is true while it carefully wrestles with what is not true. During the more
recent pontificates of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI in particular, much
first-class thinking originated in the papacy itself. Pope Francis is not and does
not pretend to be an intellectual. Indeed, he often has rather harsh words for
academics as well as bureaucrats. No one would confuse his homilies with
philosophic tractates. His encyclical on the environment created as much
controversy about fact and philosophic presuppositions as we have seen for
some time. Fides et Ratio and Spe Salvi, for their part, were monuments of
careful intellectual precision.
As in previous eras, some remarkable books, journals, and writers have
recently appeared under the broad name of Catholic intelligence. The Church
affirms that it has no official philosophy. But it also recognizes philosophic
views that, in logic and reason, are incompatible with the truth that it argues to
exist in its light. Such current writings indicate an intellectual ferment running
through Catholicism in different parts of the world. It is important to know this
intelligence is there whether recognized or not in the world. This vitality is not
always located in universities. Indeed, with notable exceptions, Catholic
intelligence is not a product of universities that designate themselves as Catholic.
The prevailing relativism of the culture was incisively analyzed at a high
philosophical level in the sundry magisterial teachings of St. John Paul II and
Benedict XVI. A considerable number of books can be found that would give
some sense of this ongoing vitality in the Catholic mind.
Catholicism has probably lost the cultural battle so that it must face the fact
of an intellectual world unwilling and, I would say, often incapable of accepting
the coherence we find in contemporary Catholic intelligence. This ferment has
largely been conceived in terms of inner-Western intellectual circles. A rearmed
and aggressive Islam, what it is and what it stands for in terms of clear
comprehension, has become a necessity in any estimate of the near-future of
Catholicism even in what were once thought to be lands of its own heritage.
Ever since my 1989 book, Another Sort of Learning, I have thought it of
some value to call certain books to the attention of students, professors, and that
wide range of intelligent readers who rarely come across Catholic intelligence in
any meaningful form. My usual lists of ten to twenty items are limited to books
that are not too long, though they are well thought out and often brilliantly
written.
What I want to do in this brief essay is to call attention to a number of newer
books that require more time to come to terms with. I will include here two lists
of ten books, more or less divided into older and newer books. By this
classification, I do not mean that the older books are any less fundamental or
worthy. Indeed, these older books are profound ones. That is why they are so
important. They make it quickly clear that there are things that, to be human, we
must reckon with, not just things to be done but things to know and know well.
The first list will include relatively short books that, however, are profound
and usually a delight to read. In many ways, truth can be stated clearly and
incisively in a few pages. The first list of books will be a selection of those
books that I have found to be the best way to introduce and to make clear what I
have called the Catholic mind, or, as I put it in the title of another book of mine,
The Mind That Is Catholic. These books are not necessarily about Catholic
things in a narrow sense. Nor are they apologetics. They are about what is true
when we include everything and think about it.
Over the years, I sometimes receive a request from a friend or correspondent
about “Schall’s List of Longer Books to Keep Sane By.” As most people know,
reading any book, even a good book, can be both a chore and a pleasure,
probably something of both. To understand a book, we must take time,
remember what we have read before, and keep our attention on the thesis as it
goes along. We must remember that it is we ourselves who want to know the
truth. We ought to try to find it even if it requires our time and careful attention.
What I have in mind in this second list is to call attention to books that make a
more thorough articulation of Catholic intelligence in general or in a given area
of human reality.
On reading such books, I think that any fair reader will acknowledge that
Catholicism does explain itself in the light of what it holds and in the light of
alternative views of the world. It does not only deal with itself but with what
opposes it and with the validity of any alternative views. It is basic to the
integrity of the Catholic mind that it includes a just appreciation of what opposes
it. This inclusion is part of what it needs to know even about itself.
In this way, the Catholic mind is unique. It not only must know what is
specific to itself, but what is proposed by other views of reality. Since it holds
that truth is one, it must see what other views are about and how they are
developed. It is not just interested in them for curiosity’s sake, but to examine
whether they are true. However annoying it might be to a relativist or liberal
culture to confront something that claims to be true, the fact is that someone
must ask whether this relativist view is itself true. It is in fact incoherent on its
own terms. The Catholic mind is not based on relativism or on sheer diversity
for its own sake. It has a grounding in what is that allows all things to cohere.
What I want to do here then is to indicate some twenty books that are, as I
see it, the Catholic mind at work doing what it does best: that is, explaining the
reasons for its claim to truth and the way it judges other views in view of these
reasons. I do not deny that Catholics argue among themselves about some of
these things. These two lists of ten books are not necessarily the best or the only
ones available for the same purpose. The number of available good books is
enormous. These lists are intended simply to put in anyone’s hands a series of
intelligent books that leave little doubt that something here must be reckoned
with. These books, on reading them, on owning them, on having them on our
shelves available to us, will, I think, give a confidence that truth is being
honorably and accurately pursued and articulated in the Catholic mind.
I have tried to include books from various angles and to include different
aspects of human intelligence. I could easily find other groupings of ten books
that would do the same thing. But my purpose here is to provide a guide, a
grounding that can stand by itself. Here, I am interested in helping someone who
wants to begin, who does not know where to go. What I would hope is that these
books will provide a solid but short library, if you will. They are designed to
make clear to anyone who reads them that Catholic intelligence, in spite of or
perhaps because of all its own turmoil, is what it says it is, that is, a universal,
intelligent, and coherent pursuit of the truth. Catholicism is an intellectual
religion. It understands that its revelation is directed to reason and must be met
in its light. It must, to be itself, include not only the knowledge it has received
from revelation, but that knowledge that comes from experience, philosophical
reflection, and other forms of scientific knowledge.

II.

The Initial List

1. Philosophy—An Introduction by J. M. Bochenski
2. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
3. A Guide for the Perplexed by E. F. Schumacher
4. New Cosmological Proofs for the Existence of God by Robert Spitzer
5. Josef Pieper: An Anthology
6. The God of Faith and Reason by Robert Sokolowski
7. The Philosophy of Tolkien by Peter Kreeft
8. Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader by Mario d’Souza
9. The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert Reilly
10. Seeing Things Politically by Pierre Manent

The Second List

1. A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth
Century by Robert Royal
2. The Phenomenology of the Human Person by Robert Sokolowski
3. Jesus of Nazareth, 3. Vols., by Benedict XVI
4. Redeeming Economics by John D. Mueller
5. The Unity of Philosophic Experience by Etienne Gilson
6. Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Edward Feser
7. A Robert Spaemann Reader by David Schindler
8. Making Gay Okay by Robert Reilly
9. Catholicism and Evolution by Michael Chaberek
10. The Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being by David Walsh

Such are the various books on various topics that I would recommend. When
one has finished such short lists, of course, other books come immediately to
mind that should have been included. I think of A. D. Sertillanges’s The
Intellectual Life, Rémi Brague’s The Legend of the Middle Ages, Josef Pieper’s
In Defense of Philosophy, Daniel Mahoney’s The Other Solzhenitsyn, Brendan
Purcell’s From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the Light of
Creation and Evolution, James Hitchcock’s History of the Catholic Church, H.
W. Crocker’s Triumph, and Robert Spitzer’s trio of books: Happiness, Suffering,
and Transcendence.
Then there is a whole list of other authors—John Finnis, Robert George,
George Weigel, Alasdair Mac-Intyre, Charles Taylor, Paul Johnson, John
Haldane, Peter Redpath, Yves Simon, Hilaire Belloc, Ronald Knox, George
Marlin, Janne Haaland Matlary, Sigrid Undset, Bernard Lonergan, Stanley Jaki,
Michael Novak, Mary Ann Glendon, and a host of others.
Finally, there are those books that we should read again and again—
Scripture itself, those of Plato and Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante,
Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and John Henry Newman. There are novels and
poems that we should read, movies we should view, and art galleries we should
frequent. That is all right. Our finiteness assures that many things we will miss.
It is vanity not to know this.
But I hope that this book itself and these lists of things to be read will
accomplish in the souls of those who might chance to come across them an
intellectual beginning or encouragement, an awareness that Catholicism makes
sense when we see it spelled out by those who know what it is all about, who, as
they say in baseball, “know what the score is.” One does not have to be a
believer to see this coherence in its own terms. Issues like faith and grace are
also within this tradition. The final point is that we are not clueless. The Catholic
mind is indeed a mind and worth our trouble to know on its own terms. These
suggested books, I hope, might provide a way and a reason for us to understand
what we are.