Example of Fundamental Conflicts within a Mystical Movement

In the two preceding posts I provided my notes on Richard M. Gula's Reason Informed by Faith: Foundations of Catholic Morality. In the post below I focus on one element of the book, Gula's account of a debate among Catholic theologians in the 20th Century. 

Catholicism is a 2000-year old religion. Its theologians have always debated about the ideal relationship between reason and mysticism (faith in particular). Most Catholic theologians have tried to integrate them. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff has rightly called this attempt "misintegration." It is logically impossible to integrate contradictories. "Misintegration" is the result of such an attempt. (See the Nov. 28, 2012 post (here) for a review of Leonard Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis.)

The following example, taken from Gula's confusing account, looks at the debate among Catholic theologians from about 1940 to about 1990 (and presumably today). The key question in the debate was: What should be the source of Catholic morality? Should theologians start with the principles provided by mystical sources (Holy Scripture, Church Tradition, and the magisterium guided by the Holy Spirit)? Or should theologians begin with natural law, that is, principles which thinking about the world (which God created) can produce?

THE EVENTS

Early 20th Century: The manuals which Catholic teachers used to teach Catholic morality presented the "classical moral theology" of Catholicism. Gula is unclear here, but apparently the classical moral theology was the result of Catholic theologians thinking about ("reflecting on" ) moral problems as natural law, without referring directly to the roots of Catholic morality in specifically Christian beliefs. (p. 1, par. 1)

1940-1970: A movement arose wanting to "Christianize" Catholic morality by rooting that morality directly into Holy Scripture and "the mysteries of faith." (p. 1, par. 2) Gula does not say so, but apparently this Christianizing movement was a reaction against an earlier movement to root Catholic morality in natural law.

1962-1965: The Second Vatican Council calls for radical revision of the manuals of morality. (p. 1, par. 1)

Late 1960s-early 1970s: Some Catholic theologians agreed with the Second Vatican Council's call to revise the manuals but broke from the early revisionists, the ones who wanted to base morality directly on Holy Scripture and other specifically Catholic sources. These new theologians instead wanted to use a philosophical method to develop "autonomous ethics," that is, ethics based on, not God's revelations (in Holy Scripture), but on thinking about the human person who was created by God to have a certain nature and must discover morality for himself through reason. (p. 1, par. 2)

Why did many Catholic theologians of the autonomous-ethics movement in the 1960s to 1970s want to revise Catholic morality's roots? They had two motivations. First was that the non-Catholic culture around them was becoming more secular, and a philosophical approach would be more acceptable to secularists. Second was that Catholic theologians of the autonomous-ethics movement reacted against the earlier Christianizing phase of renewal, the phase that began in the 1940s and wanted to ground Catholic morality in Catholic mystical sources. Apparently the Catholic theologians of the autonomous-ethics movement of the 1970s objected to relying on specifically Catholic roots for two reasons. First, the earlier renewalists, the Christianizers, apparently published essays that were "uncritical," that is, they did not meet rigorous academic standards and therefore were an embarrassment. (Gula is not clear here.) Second, the earlier, Christianizing renewal movement's products (which were rooted in specifically Catholic sources) were too sectarian, that is, too Catholic. That was a problem in the 1970s and later because by then Catholic theologians wanted to appeal to intellectuals all over the world regardless of their religious choices. (Apparently these Catholic autonomous- ethics theologians of the 1970s wanted to be "multicultural" in appeal.) (p. 1, par. 3)

1970s: Apparently still another movement arose among Catholic theologians. (Gula is not clear about the timing.) This movement, the "faith ethics" movement, arose in reaction against the autonomous-ethics movement. The faith-ethics movement's theologians said that mysticism (specifically in the form of God's revelations) must have a role in forming Catholic morality. Thus this movement of the late 1970s wanted to restore the Christianizing renewalist movement of the 1940s to 1950s. (p. 1, par. 4)

1980s: At the time of Gula's writing (1989), Catholic theologians, considered as a group, were in "tension." (That is the academic word for "contradiction.") They were trying to meet both demands—"trying to include the orientation of faith ethics, while preserving at the same time reason's critical reflection on human experience which characterizes autonomous ethics." 

In other words, Gula says, Catholic theologians generally wanted to avoid relying on either sectarianism (faith ethics) or humanism (autonomous ethics) in isolation. (p. 1, par. 4) Instead, the Catholic theologians of the 1980s wanted to speak of Catholic morality "in a language accessible to nonbelievers" as well as Catholic believers. (p. 1, par. 4 continuing onto p. 2) This is an example of the Catholic "both/and" approach to many issues. ("Faith and reason" is an example.) It is "misintegration," and the Church advocates both at the same time.

SUMMARY

Catholic theologians from around 1940 to around 1990 turned from one pole to another, that is, from open mysticism to the truncated, Catholic version of reason. They made their turns sometimes for loyalty to their mystical sources and at other times for the hope of reaching their modern goal of being able to talk to all individuals everywhere, regardless of religious or cultural background.  Catholic theologians continue today trying to find the right mix of contradictory sources of knowledge. Trying to "integrate" mysticism and (alleged) reason is an effort that is inherently unstable. The instability leads to conflict and confusion in the movement.

Burgess Laughlin

Author, The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, described at http://www.reasonversusmysticism.com/

A Catholic Theologian's View of Reason and Mysticism

In the previous post, I briefly reviewed Richard M. Gula's Reason Informed by Faith: Foundations of Catholic Morality. The post below records some of my notes on Gula's views of reason and mysticism.

REASON. What is reason? Gula provides no direct answer. Curiously, in a book dedicated in part to reason, the index has no entry for reason. The reader must infer Gula's meaning of "reason" from clues. Here is one clue. At one point he implies that reason is "critical reflection on human experience." That sounds promising. He says that critical reflection is "a valid source for coming to know what is morally required." However, his justification for doing so is the "principle of mediation: "... only through the human ... do we come to know God and respond to what God is ... requiring us ... to do." That principle in turn rests on "a commitment of faith by which we accept the mystery of Christ as the full revelation of God and accept the sources of faith as valid sources of coming to the truth about God, being human, and living in the world." (p. 8) So, according to Gula, "reason" works on the material provided mystically by God. This is not reason as the faculty of forming abstractions logically from sense-perception of the natural world. 

"Reflection" is a synonym for reason in Gula's view. At one point (p. 46), Gula even speaks of "reflection informed by faith" as he spoke of "reason informed by faith in the title of his book. "Reflection" is an appropriate word here. The Catholic thinker reflects on ideas that come from outside of him; he does not create these ideas. He reflects on them as premises of some sort in his chain of thinking. 

When should we use reason and how? In a section called "Reflection," Gula says: "We turn to the language of the mind when we want to support, analyze, and communicate what we grasp by heart." (p. 16) Again Gula says that in ethics, reason (which he refers to as "rational explanations" and "conceptual knowledge") is useful if we want "to communicate values and to argue for or against a position." (p. 84) Reason, then, is for persuasively conveying ideas to other individuals, not for gaining new ideas of our own. Reason is rhetoric.

The strict logic of a scientific nature is necessary in morality in order to defend publicly what we have decided.  But we do not actually make our decisions in the same logical way that we try to justify them. Ordinarily in the oral life, we lead with the heart. Judgments of rationality follow in a complementary way. (p. 316)

We get ideas—in least in the field of ethics—from God via revelation and our "heart," and then we use reason to tidy up our position when speaking to others. So much for reason, at least in the field of ethics. (Gula's view of the roles of reason in other fields are not clear in this book.)

MYSTICISM. Gula does not use the word "mysticism" to identify the class of alternatives to reason. Instead he identifies each form of mysticism individually. For example, early in the book Gula names three "theological sources of faith—scripture, Jesus, and the church." (p. 4) A Catholic takes on faith the ideas conveyed through scripture, through Jesus's words as preserved in Catholic tradition, and through the Church's magisterium, its special teaching ability, as guided by the Holy Spirit. The following passage makes those sources explicit:

The Christian conviction about the good is governed by the religious beliefs expressed in the stories of the Bible, especially in Jesus, and further expounded in the theological tradition of the church. (p. 44)

Another form of Catholic mysticism is "sensitivity," as shown in two passages:

(1) Sensitivity is fundamental. It implies that moral living begins in the heart and not with an abstract principle about the nature of being human from which we draw crisp conclusions. ... The foundational experience that awakens our moral consciousness ... is the experience of the sacredness of human life, or the value of persons as persons. All morality is organically linked to this foundational experience. The value of persons as persons can only be appreciated. It is not something we reason to or can prove with satisfaction of a logical syllogism. That is why the foundational moral experience is a matter of the heart. ... To bring sensitivity to moral analysis, then, is to engage artistic or mystical insight in the service of the moral life and moral reflection. (pp. 13-14)

(2) The sensitivity required for the moralist to engage in moral 'theological' reflection is a sensitivity of the heart attuned to the presence of God. ... Without this prayerful attentiveness to God, moral reflection [that is, "reason"] stops short of attending to the fullness of the relationships which make up the moral life. (p. 15)

Yet another form of mysticism appearing in Gula's book is the mysticism of "theological code words." For example, Gula says, the term "Trinity" is a "theological code word" for the "freedom and totality of God's self-giving." (p.65) You see or hear the word "Trinity" and then you "know" something about God.

Gula identifies a last form: the mysticism of experience. 

Evaluative knowledge, symbolized by the heart, is the kind of knowledge we have when we are 'caught up' in someone or something through personal involvement or commitment. Evaluative knowledge is more personal, more self-involving than conceptual knowledge of facts or ideas, for it has to do with grasping the quality of a person, object, or event. We do not gain evaluative knowledge by words but by touch, sight, and sound, by experiencing victories and failures, sleeplessness and devotion. ...  In short, evaluative knowledge is a felt knowledge which we discover through personal involvement and reflection. (p. 84)

IMAGINATION. In Gula's Catholicism, reason is not the faculty of integration of sense data into abstractions. Reason is instead merely a faculty of argumentation, that is, lining ideas up syllogistically, mainly for persuasion.

Catholicism values integration, connecting things into a system, as Gula says through out his book. If not reason, then what in Catholicism performs integration? Gula's answer is the faculty of "imagination." Four passages illustrate it.

(1) Understood in its deepest sense, the imagination ... is the capacity to construct a world. By means of the imagination we bring together diverse experiences into a meaningful whole. (p. 71) 

(2) The imagination connects "diverse beliefs and experiences." (p. 72)

(3) When religious beliefs, for example, are part of the imaginative process, they enter into the content of what we experience and contribute toward connecting the many dimensions of experience with the values entailed in those beliefs. (p. 72) 

(4) The imagination informs what we think, what we see, the way we feel, our readiness to act, and the direction of our actions. (p. 72)

RELATIONSHIP OF REASON AND MYSTICISM. We have seen above that Gula cites various sources of mysticism, that is, non-rational claims to "knowledge." He restricts "reason" to reflection on ideas that have come into the mind in various ways. He thus expands mysticism and shrinks reason. What is the relationship between them? The next three passages show that Gula's Catholicism claims adherence to both faith and reason.

(1) Characteristically, Catholic moral theology relies on 'mediation' for coming to know God and what faith requires. This means that it takes seriously not only revelation and the tradition of the Church, but also critical reflection ["reason"] on ongoing human experience as well. Both faith and reason, then, are the fundamental sources to which we appeal in giving content to ethics [theory] and morals [practice] within Catholic moral theology. (p. 10)

(2) Our affective commitment to ... the value of persons ... are 'reasons of the heart' which ultimately cannot be proven, yet which will always remain the final court of appeal for our moral judgments. We appeal to 'reasons of the head', or rational arguments, to confirm and demonstrate in a way that can be convincing to another what we already know by heart. In the moral life, head and heart work together. (p. 14)

(3) The Catholic tradition has not maintained ... a complete dependence of morality on faith. It holds to a relative autonomy for faith and morality. Faith informs reason, but it does not replace it. Faith and reason are the two sources of moral knowledge to which the Catholic tradition appeals. (p. 45)

Gula acknowledges the central problem in claiming both faith and reason: How does one decide to use one or the other claim to knowledge?

The challenge to moral theology today lies in maintaining the proper relationship of faith and reason for determining what constitutes morally good character and right moral action. (p. 46) 

When pressed for demands for a rational approach, Gula resorts to polylogism and subjectivism: 

Thus, the 'therefore' which links morality to religious beliefs is not by way of a strict inference of syllogistic logic. [Instead, the] inference is made by way of ... 'the logic of self-involvement'.

Such a "logic" considers the believer's "certain manner of living" and "having certain attitudes and feelings." (pp. 48-49) An additional form of Catholic mysticism, the mysticism of Christian symbols, ties up any loose ends left by other forms of mysticism.

Using a Christian symbol of some sort to look on a situation, then, will determine to some extent what one sees [the is, the facts] and what one does [the ought, the values]." (p.50)

SUMMARY. In Gula's Catholicism, mysticism is broad and takes many forms; reason is narrow and is truncated to being a tool of rhetoric. The Church insists on claiming both, leaving no room for the mind that starts from sense-perception, forms abstractions about the world, and then selects values from among those facts. For the Church, mysticism is the means for obtaining morals from another world, and "reason" is the means the Church uses to argue for its positions.

Burgess Laughlin

Author, The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, described at http://www.reasonversusmysticism.com/

BkRev: Rubenstein's Aristotle's Children

Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages, Orlando, Harcourt, 2003, 368 pages.

The usual reason to write a book review is to bring a book to readers' attention. The usual review either encourages readers to buy it it or discourages them if the reviewer thinks readers are hearing unjustly positive views elsewhere. Sometimes book reviews are useful for other purposes. In the following brief review, one of my purposes is to show that the author uses his book of history to support his side in the today's war between reason and mysticism. His book is an example of indirect activism.

(I have used my own books, The Aristotle Adventure and The Power and the Glory, for activism, though to support the reason side of the war.)

SUBJECT OF ARISTOTLE'S CHILDREN. Often the title of a book is a "hook" that catches readers' attention. The subtitle is the part that follows a colon or appears in smaller type; it states the subject. That is the case for my book, The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith. That is not the case for Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages.

Rubenstein's book is partly about the influence of Aristotle's philosophy on intellectuals in the religious cultures of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. However, the book is mostly about the conflicts that arose in the Middle Ages when Christian intellectuals tried to "integrate" Aristotle's philosophy of this natural world with their Christian ethics based mystically in supernaturalism. (Admirers of philosopher Leonard Peikoff's book, The DIM Hypothesis, reviewed here, will recognize the medieval attempt at "integration" as M, misintegration.)

Conflicts, as well as the failed attempts to "resolve" the conflicts, are the dominant subject of the book. That is a natural choice of subject for the author, Richard E. Rubenstein. He was a professor of "conflict resolution," at George Mason University, at the time of the publication of the book, 2003.

The subject is important, Rubenstein says, because in the Latin-reading culture of the Middle Ages Aristotle's philosophy "forever altered the way we think about nature, society, and even about God." (p. ix) Rubenstein says further that

[t]he Aristotelian Revolution transformed Western thinking and set our culture on a path of scientific inquiry that it has followed ever since the Middle Ages. The confrontation between faith and reason that turned the medieval universities into ideological battlegrounds continues to this day in societies around the globe. (pp. ix-x)

Why study this medieval conflict today? We should study it, Professor Rubenstein says, because "the concerns of these medieval thinkers resonate so sonorously with ours." (p. xi); and the underlying conflict of reason vs. faith is emerging again in our own time. (p. 11)

In Aristotle's Children, Rubenstein is mainly a storyteller. He relies on the scholarly research of academics (as I did in The Aristotle Adventure). He uses a story-teller's techniques. He begins with a puzzle: The central medieval conflict over Aristotle's influence was not mainly between the Church and outside Aristotelians, but a conflict within the Church, with the Church leadership generally calling for inclusion of Aristotle's works in the course of university studies. (p. 7) Why did the Church leadership—unlike religious leaders among Muslims and Jews—do so?

Throughout the book, Rubenstein makes a case for his answer:

Rather than choose between the new learning and the old religion, the popes and scholars of the High Middle Ages tried to modernize the Church by reconciling faith and reason. (p. xi)

STRUCTURE OF ARISTOTLE'S CHILDREN. In structure, as well as content, this book is a history, as both the author's own statement (p. 2) and a reading of the chapter subheadings in Table of Contents show. Unfortunately, in the Table of Contents the author does not supply dates to make the progression clear. I have added them here: Aristotle's philosophy of this world and Aristotle rediscovered (Ch. 1); how Aristotle was lost in the ancient world and found again (Ch. 2); Peter Abelard and the revival of reason in the 1100s (Ch. 3); Aristotle among the West European heretics in the 1100s and 1200s (Ch. 4); Aristotle and the friars who debated the heretics (Ch. 5); friars debating friars at the University of Paris in the 1200s (Ch. 6); William of Ockham's divorce of faith and reason in the 1300s (Ch. 7); and the emergence of modern science in the 1500s and 1600s, resulting in today's split between reason and faith (Ch. 8).

THEME OF ARISTOTLE'S CHILDREN. The Aristotelian Revolution erupted in Latin-reading Western Europe in the late 1100s and early 1200s when Aristotle's philosophy overall became available for the first time in Latin texts, thanks to translations from Greek and Arabic sources. Part of the theme of the book is that in the 1300s, a century after the Aristotelian Revolution, "faith and reason were already headed toward the conflict-ridden separation that has characterized their relations ever since." (p. xii)

Rubenstein sees here an opportunity for modern culture: We can learn from the medieval attempt at synthesis of faith and reason that preceded the split. Perhaps we can apply some form of synthesis of faith and reason to our own time. (See Ch. 8, but especially pp. 272-273, 281, 292, 293, and 296-298.)

Today "we have much to learn from their [the Aristotelians'] vision of science infused by ethics [coming from religion] and a religion unafraid of reason." Tying together science (reason) and religious ethics (faith) can lead to "a more humane and integrated global future." (p. xii) In essence that is the theme of the book: To solve the many conflicts of religion versus secularity, such as the conflicts over homosexuality and abortion, modern world culture must integrate religion and science by integrating faith and reason.

What is mythical is the idea that faith and reason have always been implacable enemies—an idea that implies that any other relationship between them is impossible. (p. 273)

Reason could transform the earth, if only science and technology were inspired and guided by a new global morality. Faith would expand and mature, if only the world's religions addressed themselves to long-term trends in society and nature, and helped to create that global morality. (p. 298)

So, a "global morality"—that would be developed, I note, in a consensus among the Taliban in Afghanistan, Christian nationalists in the USA, the orthodox in Israel, Hindu nationalists in India, and others—would "guide" reason everywhere around the world. Knowingly or not, Rubenstein is, in his own multi-cultural way, echoing Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), who in his 1998 encyclical letter (to bishops), Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), called for faith and reason to work together, with faith providing the guidance, that is, the ethics. The assumptions of both Rubenstein and John Paul II are that reason cannot create ethics (our guide to action in this life) and ethics can come only from God through revelation to religious people. (Philosopher Ayn Rand's 1961 essay, "The Objectivist Ethics," has developed the foundation of an ethics using reason alone—here.)

CONCLUSION. Rubenstein's call for "integration" of reason and faith is support for mysticism. Reason and mysticism are opposites. Any attempt to reconcile them gives mysticism respect it has not earned. Rubenstein does not object. "Resolving" conflict is his goal. His book, Aristotle's Children, though informative historically, argues for mysticism.

Burgess Laughlin
Author, The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith, described here