By Joseph R. Wood
It is Lent, when our mortifications and the Church’s readings give us a sharper opportunity to think about what we love and whether we are loving the right things.
James Patrick was a wise man and a good friend. I met him after he founded a small higher education institution, St. Thomas More College in Fort Worth. I say “institution” because, even setting aside its size and its location in some residential houses near Texas Christian University, it resembled little of anything we would recognize today as a college.
He had previously taught at the University of Dallas, at the University of the South in Sewanee, and at the University of Tennessee. He had studied architecture, theology, philosophy, and practically everything else. He was an Episcopal priest before entering the Catholic Church.
Jim was one of the many wise people who shared much of their time and kindness with me. He was a man of letters, an example of Western civilization. It could be said that in many ways he was another Fr. Jim Schall.
He knew of my interest in philosophy and gave me one of the greatest gifts I received when I began my formal studies. He warned me, gently but clearly, that when philosophy gets up on its feet, it gets into trouble.
It is a concise way of saying that when philosophy—the use of human reason to know the full truth of “what is”—divorces itself from faith, bad things happen.
While not loving God above all things disorders any life, the intellectual life seems particularly vulnerable to losing its way. Perhaps because many intellectuals are very smart and can really advance quite far in the knowledge of reality, so they become too ambitious and proud.
A paradigmatic modern case was Martin Heidegger, a truly brilliant mind who produced great philosophical work, abandoned his Catholic faith, and became a Nazi (the degree of his cooperation with the Hitler regime is debated).
The original case study, however, must be the geniuses who conceived the idea of the Tower of Babel. It always strikes me that God did not say: “Look at those fools, trying to do something impossible.” He stopped them because they might have succeeded. He interrupted their logos, confusing their rational language so that such collective enterprises would be less likely thereafter.
Reason, as the builders of Babel used it, might have achieved something that, presumably, God knew would not be their true good. They sought Heaven without depending on God.
What does it profit us to gain the whole world if we lose our souls?
“Philosophy” derives from Greek and means “love of wisdom.” It is very easy for philosophers to focus on the “wisdom”—the truth of things—and forget the “love” part. St. Augustine and other Christian philosophers knew this danger and accepted the idea of “I believe in order to understand.” Faith is given to me as my first love—the love of God—and then I use my reason to seek truth within that love.
Jim Patrick and Fr. Jim Schall understood that approach.
Some philosophers, including Leo Strauss, who helped revitalize the study of ancient philosophical wisdom in recent decades, would disagree. He thought it was impossible for a man of faith to be a true philosopher, since faith would restrict the search for truth, which in itself has no restrictions.
I wonder if that kind of thinking led the poet-philosopher Dante to the point where he begins his Divine Comedy. The beginning of the Inferno is one of the most famous openings of any journey in Western literature:
Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
for the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah, how hard a thing it is to say
what that forest was like, so savage, rough and stern,
which even in recall renews the fear!
So bitter is it, death is little more…
How I entered there I cannot say,
so full of sleep I was
when I forsook the true path.