Theology Annual vol.2 1978 p.161-168
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It may be thought that after the Second Vatican Council issued its DECREE ON PRIESTLY TRAINING, there should be little or no difficulty in planning seminary courses. However, this has not been the case because of the limitations of the document. For the decree, which gives basic objectives of curriculum and instruction, takes for granted the traditional study of philosophy and theology without critically evaluating the reasons why they are still considered most appropriate for the education of the priest. Perhaps those who wrote the decree saw this conclusion as so obvious that it did not need to be stated; and perhaps most would agree that this is true for the field of theology. But the same can not be said of philosophy. For although many would agree that philosophy is most appropriate, there are others who consider the social sciences or some other area of the sciences as better suited to the overall training of the contemporary priest. Those who hold this second opinion see the Vatican decree as having done little more than add the weight of authority to one side of a disputed question.
This being the case, it is the purpose of this paper to examine the basic starting points from which these differences of opinion spring and to try to put them in clear perspective. It is hoped that continued investigation of this particular question will lead to a more efficient and effective curriculum for that two-year unit of major seminary instruction which precedes the study of theology.
Philosophy has traditionally been considered the counter-part of theology in the education of the priest and this position was taken for granted in the Second Vatican Council. The DECREE ON PRIESTLY TRAINING states that the basic curriculum objective in seminary education is "a more effective coordination of philosophy and theology so that they supplement one another in revealing to the minds of the students with ever increasing clarity the mystery of Christ." 1 Now it is evident that this statement means both philosophy and theology have a complementary role to play in this unfolding. For philosophy this role is defined as the contributing of a "solid and consistent knowledge of man, the world and God based on the philosophic patrimony which is forever valid." 2 In line with this it can be rightly understood that the role of theology is similar, namely the contributing of a solid and consistent knowledge of man, the world and God based on the theological patrimony of the Church. It is also quite clear that philosophy and theology are not seen as presenting two separate but equal pictures, but rather as presenting one picture which is indeed the mystery of Christ. Thus a basic principle behind this curriculum objective is that proper philosophical reasoning supplements theology in the unfolding of the faith.
Now it is perfectly obvious to anyone involved in seminary teaching that the logical reasons for holding such a position can be found in the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. After all, an effective coordination between philosophy and theology is a profoundly Thomistic theme, and in its day was a radical departur from traditional thinking. For up to that time any secular thought that did not have the authoritative approval of the Church Fathers was considered a dangerous innovation. Thomas changed this through his doctrine of the one truth coming from several sources which doctrine he put into practice in his SUMMA THEOLOGIAE, thus wedding philosophy and theology together in a way that saw each complement the other in presenting to the mind of man a complete picture of reality.
The way that reason and faith complement each other, Thomas explained as follows. Man is endowed with a light of knowledge through his very nature. But this light of natural knowledge is incapable of knowing all things particularly those things which concern what he can not experience. Thus for a complete knowledge of reality, revelation is necessary from whence comes the second source of knowledge for man, the light of faith. Now the light of faith is an auxiliary to natural knowledge in building up and completing that part of the total picture of reality which can not be grasped by reason alone. In this structure of the one truth coming from both natural knowledge and the light of faith, there is an area in which both faith and reason overlap. Thus that God exists, that He is One and the like can be demonstrated by the light of natural reason as well as be presented to us by faith. This means that the quantitative content of what is known by the light of faith and by the light of reason will vary in different people. Thus the more intelligent man can know more about God by the light of natural knowledge than the less intelligent who must depend more on the light of faith for his knowledge about God. However, the end point－－the knowledge itself－－will be the same for one as for the other.
Given the above, it is clear that natural knowledge and the knowledge of faith have an intrinsic connection. Neither natural knowledge alone nor the knowledge that comes from revelation will give to man that whole picture of reality which is, of course, the truth. But because of this organic unity, revelation can correct defects in reasoning and reason offers deductive possibilities that allow man to understand more clearly through analogy even those truths that can be known only by the light of faith.
Now given this analysis of Thomas' thought, it seems an obvious conclusion to those who accept his reasoning that philosophy and theology are really inseparable because together they produce one result, namely the true picture of reality. Granted this, however, there are those who say this analysis describes only what Thomas did in his day but does not describe accurately what Thomas intended. The true focus of Thomas Aquinas can only be understood by comparing the intellectual climate of his time with that of the twentieth century and then, using this as a background, by analysing his work.
By reason or natural knowledge, Aquinas was actually speaking of secular science which in his time and in his way of looking at it was found at its best in the works of the philosopher Aristotle. For this reason Thomas abandoned traditional thought and accepted Aristotelianism. From his time to ours, however, what is best in secular knowledge has become embodied in the field of science. Thus what Thomas set out to do in the thirteenth century no less an eminent Thomist than Etienne Gilson describes in the following way for Thomas' twentieth century counterpart. "He would be taking the scientific view of nature and putting it to the service of religion in a synthesis in which everything starts from faith and returns to it." 3 Now this is exactly what Aquinas did in his time. He took Aristotle's philosophy which was the current science and put it to the service of religion in a synthesis in which everything started from faith as the absolute measure of truth and returned to it as the end point of all investigation. So if Thomas Aquinas were alive today, he would be using science rather than philosophy for his synthesis since it is science today that gives us our contemporary human picture of reality. This being the case, it is more in keeping with the mind of Saint Thomas to concentrate on science as the counter- part to theology in unfolding the deeper meaning of the mystery of Christ while waiting for that genius of our day who like Thomas will pull together science and theology into a new synthesis.
Now whether Thomas Aquinas were he alive today would be putting science to the use of his theological pursuits is only speculation. But what is known is that Thomas considered philosophy as being almost totally directed toward a knowledge of God. And so true did he consider this of metaphysics that he gives us an interesting insight into the philosophy curriculum of his day when he says in the SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES that "this is why metaphysics which deals with divine things is the last part of philosophy to be learned." 4 Given this conviction of Aquinas, then, it is difficult to see how he would choose science, which is obviously not concerned with the divine, over philosophy and particularly over metaphysics as that branch of human knowledge which he would use together with theology to form his synthesis. On the other hand, however, science left out of such a synthesis would sorely tax his conviction of the unity of knowledge.
But all of these arguments have little or no effect on those who do not start from the basic Thomistic principle of the unity of all knowledge and therefore would see various fields of knowledge as having only an extrinsic connection with one another. And basically it is because of this extrinsic connection only that they claim a particular richness afforded by the various sciences in unfolding the mystery of Christ. This is a classical positivist position and it is best understood by looking at the kind of analysis those who hold this position would make of the deficiencies of Aristotelian thought in the development of knowledge. Since Aristotelian thought is at the heart of the philosophical patrimony which is considered forever valid, it is a clear indication of how useless positivists would see it in the service of the faith.
Aristotle's philosophy by its very nature binders the pursuit of knowledge. The reason is that Aristotle relied on a logic of classification whereby through qualitative judgments distinc-tions were noted among various things. Quality, then, became the basic category of reality. Aristotle's investigation of things consisted of observation and through observation sorting out those qualities which were merely accidental from those qualities which were essential. By repeatedly doing this, Aristotle was able to intuit the essence of a thing which then became the why of its activity. Now the difficulty with this approach is that the information that one receives from such a method is trivial. For example, one arrives at the knowledge that the essential quality of man is rationality. From that point on, any time you ask a question such as why do men write books or why do men make laws, your answer is always a statement of man's essence, namely because man is rational. But this kind of a causal answer does not really give us any new information; rather it simply unpacks from the essence of man what we have already put into it when originally sorting out the essence. Thus writing books and being rational are really the same thing; we are staling a tautology. The difficulty basically goes back to Aristotle's conception of causes. He did delineate four causes; the efficient cause－－the internal or external agency which makes a thing move, the material cause－－the stuff of which a thing is made, the formal cause－－the pattern or law of development, and the final cause－－the end toward which a thing develops. Now when we look closely at all these causes, we find that efficient, formal and final causes are usually the essence in disguise. Thus a thing does what it does because it is what it is. Now if we ask the question why does a rose grow, using Aristotle's system of knowledge, our answer would be that a rose is a rose because a rose is a rose－－the classic tautology. Thus the great flaw in Aristotle's approach is that it allows for so few deductive consequences which makes it theoretically trivial for the development of knowledge. It is only when one dispenses with Aristotle's conception of causality and begins to explain things in terms of the functional dependence of variables that human knowledge is able to blossom forth.
The positivist approach, on the other hand, has proved itself very fruitful in the development of the theological sciences. Scripture studies which had languished for centuries underwent tremendous development when the positive approach became standard. And in recent years other studies, particularly the study of liturgy and the sacraments, have expanded under the same influence. And moral theology is undergoing the same transformation today under the same impetus. This being the case, a much better preparation for the fuller unfolding of the mystery of Christ in its relation to man during the study of theology would be a solid background in the sciences which form the basic positivist approach.
Now while the positivist approach can indeed show out-standing results in the cognitive content of certain areas of knowledge within the broad field of theology, it can not be denied that because its fields of study can have no intrinsic connection to theology, it suffers in relation to theology from the same difficulty that the Aristotelian approach suffers in relation to science, namely theoretical triviality. Whereas philosophy can do valuable service in three areas－－the background of human knowledge on which the faith is built, the expanded understanding of the faith through analogy and the defence of the faith through its ability to demonstrate truth, falsity and necessity－－the social sciences or any other field of knowledge using the positivist approach can do only one service in the area of the background human knowledge on which the faith is built. The reason why the approach is so limited in relation to theology is the lack of an adequate notion of causality. When final causes were consciously dispensed with as irrelevant to the advance of science and efficient causality was reduced solely to physical agents interacting among themselves, science arrived at a position where it was unable to contribute anything other than trivia to the unfolding of the mystery of Christ. For a field of study which denies final causality can not in fact contribute to the unfolding of what is the final cause of all human activity and the cause of causes. And the underdeveloped notion of efficient causality in science leads us to trivia. Suppose we were talking about the ascension of Christ. "The only thing that such an approach could contribute to this topic would be something on the interdependence of variables such as oxygen, pressure and the human body at various levels of ascent. So outside of general background knowledge the contribution of science be it physical or social will be very limited indeed whereas the contribution of philosophy by the very nature of the field of study will be quite superior.
These, then, are the basic positions and the basic arguments for and against philosophy or the sciences as the more suitable field of knowledge to be coupled with theology in the major seminary curriculum. However, since dialectical thought has a great effect on our age, there is a growing tendency in practice to arrive at a synthesis of these two conflicting positions whereby individual questions are studied from both the philosophic and the scientific points of view, noting what each area of knowledge has to contribute to a fuller understanding of that topic. It is interesting, of course, that this is the position which had developed in theology in the post-scholastic period. But there is indeed sound rescuing behind such a procedure in the philosophy curriculum which gets right at the heart of the contemporary controversy concerning knowledge. Because what is popularly considered a conflict between theology and science－－sacred knowledge and secular－－is really the historical and unresolved conflict between the two great branches of secular knowledge, philosophy and science. What this means is before any new synthesis can be developed between secular and sacred knowledge, secular knowledge must first set its own house in order. In short, if Thomas Aquinas were alive today, his first task would be to unify science and philosophy, a need which did not exist in his day. Only after that could he turn to the synthesis of human knowledge and theology.
1.DECREE ON PRIESTLY TRAINING of Vatican Council II, V, 14.
3.Etienne Gilson, THE PHILOSOPHER AND THEOLOGY. (New York: Random House, 1962) p. 217.
4.SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES, Bk. I, Chap. 4, No. 3.
Prepared by: Holy Spirit Seminary College