logos ognizing, as Abelard wrote in the prologue, that the obscurity and contradictions in ancient writings may be explained upon many grounds, and

Transcription

1 Preface It is well known that the core values of the modern university can be traced to the emergence of a number of European universities in the Middle Ages, some of which continue to thrive to this day. Some historians suggest that the impetus driving the development of these universities was the new method of inquiry emphasizing rational analysis and debate of key concepts and practiced through the discussion of disputed questions in which the best arguments for and against an important proposition would be presented and pursued. The method, which came to be known as the Scholastic method, is best known today through the writings of St.Thomas Aquinas, but the first important step toward the development of this method seems to have been a work titled Sic et Non (Yes and No) by Peter Abelard, written in Motivated in part by charges directed against Christianity by Islamic scholars who claimed that Christianity was incoherent because contradictions on important points could be found in the writings of various Church fathers, Abelard set out 158 questions on fundamental issues (for instance, That faith is based upon reason, et contra ) 1 and collected quotations from the Church Fathers in support of each side of the question. It became immediately evident that the authority of the Fathers as established by individual statements from their writings could not be relied upon to determine the truth sought by each question, so that the reader was called upon to pursue the truth through reasoning, reclogos 5:1 winter 2002

2 6 logos ognizing, as Abelard wrote in the prologue, that the obscurity and contradictions in ancient writings may be explained upon many grounds, and may be discussed without impugning the good faith and insight of the fathers. 2 Abelard successfully converted the impasse produced by seemingly contradictory statements of authority into the energy of rational inquiry, and the stimulation of such energy was his purpose: These questions ought to serve to excite tender readers to a zealous inquiry into truth and so sharpen their wits.the master key of knowledge is, indeed, a persistent and frequent questioning. Such a conversion of intellectual energy, such a release of intellectual energy through questioning, might properly be called dramatic, and we could suggest that it was the reintroduction of a kind of drama into intellectual life that explains the power of this new method of inquiry to stimulate the emergence and development of universities. Those scholars who could most fully arouse the minds of students through powerful ways of posing and responding to important questions attracted students from great distances who wished to participate in a zealous inquiry into truth, and the institution and structure of the university developed around this dramatic core. We find surprising support for this characterization of the new method as dramatic in some of the complaints that were leveled against the Scholastic practice of the disputation after it had become a routine component of university life over several centuries, complaints alleging that practitioners when they became interested only in impressing others with their sagacity and intellectual power played to the crowd with flair and flattery, thereby obscuring the fundamental purpose of pursuing truth.the vital energy of intellectual conflict could degenerate into intellectual showmanship: drama is always in danger of being supplanted by melodrama.when scholar Deborah Tannen points to the weaknesses of what she terms the contemporary argument culture, she would seem to have in mind the degeneration of rational discussion into posed shouting

3 preface 7 matches in which the competitive aspect of argument as a battle to determine a winner takes the place of rational inquiry as a communal search for truth. That the pursuit of truth is inherently dramatic was recognized in the origins of the Western philosophical tradition. The Platonic dialogues can properly be described as a dramatization of the thought and action of Socrates, and the urgency in many of the dialogues comes to light when one recognizes that the veiled threats made against Socrates by some of the interlocutors whom he has challenged and embarrassed point toward the historical drama in the trial of Socrates played before a large jury as powerful audience whose verdict resulted in the execution of Socrates. What is the significance of the drama inherent in rational inquiry? The element of drama points to the active nature of such inquiry, to the need for the exertion of energy and will in pursuit of truth.we become attached to our opinions and we are formed by them; when those opinions are false, we need to be detached from them, overcoming the prideful resistance that often impedes such detachment, and we need to be reformed in the growing light of truth as we discern it through reason. Such action takes place through encounters with opposing and differing opinions and points of view and is thus communal and interpersonal in nature, even when the stage of the drama is transposed internally within the mind of the inquirer, as seen, for instance, in the pages of Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy. These reflections point the reader to a new feature appearing in this issue of Logos, a feature that we had considered naming disputed questions but that we have finally decided to call From a Logical Point of View. Sandra Menssen offers an eloquent introduction to this new feature, demonstrating how we intend to celebrate reason because it is the best of the natural guides we have to truth, and I commend the reader to her introduction as itself a cogent account of the importance of rational disputation in our search for truth.

4 8 logos Several other articles in this issue explore the nature of rational inquiry and demonstrate its significance in the Catholic tradition. Michael W.Tkacz shows that the conventional contemporary view of science as fact and religion as personal feeling and opinion impervious to rational scrutiny undermines the true strength of religion and seriously distorts the conceptual framework in which the relationship between science and religion can be properly understood. Fr. James Schall, S.J., drawing upon a vivid account of Socratic inquiry, reminds us of the true importance of philosophic learning. In the area of theological knowledge, Fr.Thomas G.Weinandy explores the nature of rational inquiry in systematic theology as a response to the act of faith made by the theologian, showing that the relationship between faith and rational inquiry must be kept alive and active in theological thinking. It is our hope that this journal will participate in the recurrent awakening of inquiry and will support the perennial drama in which each of us seeks truth and strives in our actions to serve the truth in the communities in which we live. This issue opens with a stimulating essay by Robert Jackson on Flannery O Connor, titled Region, Idolatry, and Catholic Irony: Flannery O Connor s Modest Literary Vision. Exploring O Connor s view of herself as a Southern writer, Jackson shows how the minority status of O Connor s Catholic faith in the largely Protestant South shapes her literary presentation of spiritual action. Jackson looks closely at O Connor s story, Parker s Back, and examines O Connor s literary relationship to fellow Southerner William Faulkner in an essay that integrates O Connor s religious perspective with her regional identity and literary style, resulting in a vivid account of what Jackson calls O Connor s modest literary vision. We turn next under the guidance of Marcia Newman to an account of Christian Cosmology in Hildegard of Bingen s Illuminations. The great twelfth-century scientist and seer (as Newman calls her) has been celebrated in recent years through beautiful performances of some of her music by groups such as Sequentia

5 preface 9 and Anonymous4, and many of her writings have been newly edited and translated within the last twenty years.we present three beautiful illustrations of Hildegard s illuminations and Newman shows how Hildegard brings to symbolic expression a visual and visceral experience of the spirit, considering the illuminations in the larger context of Hildegard s writings, and exploring Hildegard s vision of the divine. Hildegard s whole effort, Newman tells us, is to attune humanity through music, art, and the written word to this divine vision. Readers probably know Edith Stein as a result of her canonization on October 11, 1998, and Logos published an insightful account of her work in an article by Freda Mary Oben in our Winter 2000 (3:1) issue. Antonio Calcagno in this issue carries us deep into the philosophical thinking of Edith Stein with an illuminating account of a political dimension of her thought in his essay, Edith Stein: Is the State Responsible for the Immortal Soul of the Person? Calcagno focuses upon the concepts of state, person, and soul in a reading of several of Stein s writings in philosophy, providing insight into the phenomenological analyses that Stein executes and concluding that according to Stein s phenomenology of the state community, the state does have an ontic responsibility for the immortal soul, insofar as it is personal. To what degree, then, and in what ways, can such a responsibility be enacted within a state governing a modern pluralistic society? Reflections on this question and readers will recognize the timeliness of the question lead Calcagno to pose a challenge to philosophy to participate in an ethical renewal within contemporary political life. One area of law and political life in which the state becomes involved in the development of the soul is in the legal status of marriage, and the theology of marriage is an issue of great importance today, especially since in many contemporary cultures the primarily economic functions of marriage within society and the economy have receded while the personal dimension of marriage plays a role far more prominent than would have been evident in earlier times.

6 10 logos The personal importance of marriage today provides an opportunity for a renewed understanding of the theology of marriage, and Thomas M. Kelly in An Integrated Theology of Married Love offers such a renewed understanding. Grounding his account of married love in a particular understanding of nature and grace, Kelly explores what it means to speak of the sacramentality of marriage. Paying special attention to the ways in which marriage is actualized in human experience, and not only to the conceptual understanding of married love, Kelly shows how the three Christian concepts of love as eros, philia, and agape must be balanced in the ways in which married love is brought to fulfillment in relationships, forming what Kelly calls an imperfect and differentiated unity within married love. James V. Schall, S.J., seems to begin his essay On the Problem of Philosophic Learning whimsically as he narrates his search for the perfect croissant in Washington, D.C. Before long, however, readers learn that Fr. Schall s exploration is entirely within the spirit of Socratic inquiry, a spirit of inquiry that deliberately begins within the horizon of lived experience and remains in touch with the activities of bakers and cobblers while showing how deeply rooted is the love of the good in human life. The essay illuminates with pleasing clarity the spirit of philosophic inquiry and argues, provocatively, that this spirit is so powerfully embodied in the Platonic dialogues that unless there is a reading of Plato, there is no university. While contemporary cultural conditions have made it timely to emphasize the importance of reason in intellectual and spiritual life today, the distinctive Catholic task is to seek the integration of faith and reason in the pursuit of truth, and such a task is addressed by Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap., in Doing Christian Systematic Theology: Faith, Problems, and Mysteries. Drawing upon the account of theology offered by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio, Weinandy argues that systematic theology emerges from the act of faith made by the theologian in response to the Gospel and then

7 preface 11 develops as the theologian pursues a deeper understanding through rational inquiry, seeking to make what has been revealed more intelligible, lucid, and relevant to the Christian community. Weinandy explores some of the conditions that have contributed to a diminishment or even sometimes a severing of the relationship between the act of faith and the pursuit of deeper understanding in systematic theology, and then offers a vision of the proper vocation of a Christian systematic theologian. It would be impossible to offer a comprehensive account of rationality in contemporary terms without paying significant attention to modern science, and Michael W. Tkacz in Faith, Science, and the Error of Fideism shows that the tendency to define the exercise of reason primarily through the practices of modern science results in a damaging misunderstanding of the nature of religious faith, which in contrast to science comes to be viewed as a domain of attitudes and purely personal values. The essay opens with an engaging account of the education in theology of Thomas Aquinas under the direction of his Dominican teacher Albert, an education in which the study of texts such as Aristotle s History of Animals and even the active pursuit of collecting, preserving, and studying plant and animal specimens played a prominent role, demonstrating a deep understanding of the active relationship between reason and faith. Tkacz considers the dangerous attraction of the error of fideism in contemporary culture in the notion that an appeal to faith exclusive of the participation of reason somehow confers dignity and autonomy to religion and seems to protect religion from incursions from the side of science. Such a separation constitutes a false dichotomy, Tkacz argues, and he goes on to propose that we must seek an understanding of faithful reason : The only way around these difficulties is to give up fideism and realize that faith and science aim at the same thing: the truth. Our new feature, From A Logical Point of View, presents a text by philosopher James Rachels that explores a moral dilemma,

8 12 logos and then analyses of and responses to Rachels argument by R. Konyndyk DeYoung, Michael Torre, Michael Gorman, and Russell Pannier. Sandra Menssen provides a thoughtful introduction to this new feature. Michael C. Jordan Coeditor Notes 1. No English translation of Sic et Non seems to be available, but a good description of the work including a list of some of the questions posed by Abelard in the work is provided by Arthur O. Norton, Readings in the History of Education: Mediaeval Universities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1909), I have drawn upon Norton s work at several points in writing this preface. 2. Quotations from Abelard s Prologue come from The Internet Medieval Source Book, which posts the translation from James Harvey Robinson, ed., Readings in European History, 2 vols. (Boston: Ginn & Co., ),Vol. I: From the Breaking up of the Roman Empire to the Protestant Revolt,