For my last commitment here in Melbourne, I gave a retreat day for the seminarians at Corpus Christi College yesterday, where I had been staying this past week. Deacon Jim Curtain, the head of our oblates down here who is my host, is on staff there. It was a great place to stay, nice quiet bedroom in the small guesthouse, where I was the only guest all week. It was a great day. I gave the conferences from my kenosis retreat (the material that made up “The God Who Gave You Birth”). I also preached for Mass, Even though it was only an optional memorial, I decided to preach on Saint Albert the Great because there are a few things about him that strike me as salient still in our day and age. And what an opportunity to convey this message to guys preparing for ministry in the Church in this crazy world.
First of all, Saint Albert is credited with being the thinker who really separated theology from philosophy. Now, there can be a downside to that, in the sense that this is the crossover period into Scholasticism. And so this is the beginning of the slow decline of the sapiential learning that was more common in the patristic era and especially beloved in monastic circles. But the upside of it is the fact that the separation between philosophy and theology shows that there is no conflict between faith and reason; they are in a sense two different kinds of intelligences. Saint Albert referred to theology as “emotional knowledge,” whereas philosophy is more rational knowledge. They need each other. (Ironically, just that morning I watched a video that someone sent of a priest in a homily railing against following your emotions in the spiritual life. I think it is very dangerous to leave the emotions out completely and has led to a lot of problems. Just acknowledge them and let them be part of the decision-making process.)
The inheritors of this tradition, of course, were Popes John Paul II and Benedict. John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio is one of the foundational texts of my work in interreligious dialogue. (If I had started talking about it, I’d have never stopped but I did urge you to read it some time.) This is also the argument that Pope Benedict tried to make so often (often falling on deaf ears to the right and the left), that reason lets us figure out such things as that terrorism, for example, is not true religion, even that fundamentalism is not authentic religion. There are so many examples in our day and age of religion being used to condone all kinds of crazy behavior, among extreme right Christians as well as Jews and Muslims. So, this is a salient argument and culpable ignorance. As I like to say regarding my own country, when somebody says something stupid on our end, about Palestine, for instance, someone gets killed for it on the other end.
The second thing concerning Saint Albert and philosophy that gets pointed to often folds right into that. Albert, like his famous student Thomas Aquinas after him, accomplished this separation of theology from philosophy by using Aristotle. That may not seem shocking to us except for the fact that Aristotle had two things going against him. First of all, he, like Plato, was a pagan! Secondly, his philosophy was being translated and diffused around Europe by Arab Muslims. This was a shock to people of Albert’s time, especially church people. “How could you use a pagan philosopher translated by who-were-thought-to-be-heretics to explain Christian theology?” I’ve been doing some study recently about the history of Islamic thought recently, since my time at Oxford, and I don’t think people realize or remember how dependent Christian theologians were at one time on Arabic translators.
Robert Barron points out in his essay on St. Thomas how this beautifully exemplifies the truly catholic mind, “open to every and any influence, willing to embrace the truth wherever [they] found it.” Not only as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, but also Jewish thinkers such as the Rabbi Moses Maimonides and the Andalusian poet and philosopher Avicebron, and Muslim scholars such as Averroes and Avicenna. Equally important, even when they disagreed with a thinker, they “always did so with respect and without polemics.” (Remember, Aquinas was disagreeing with Augustine on this as well as St Bonaventure.) And Barron says this is “a wonderful model for our time, when the religious conversation is sadly marked by rancor and vituperation.”
The third thing, right in the same line, is that Saint Albert was named the doctor universalis–the universal doctor (could we say, the “catholic doctor”?) because of his fascination with and writings on botany, zoology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Again, this shows us not only that there is no conflict between faith and reason; there also ought to be no conflict between faith and science, even though there has been historically. Note the culture wars still going on over these issues, regarding global warming to name just one issue. A few years ago, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, then chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, was interviewed concerning the Church’s approach to evolution and science in general. He himself is a philosopher and a scholar of Saint Thomas Aquinas. And he said that he is absolutely comfortable with both the spiritual message of a reasonable church and the evidence-based lessons of science, such as evolution. They exist on different planes, he said, and “If we don’t accept science, we don’t accept reason, and reason was created by God.”
I ended by saying, “The world needs us to be holy right now. It also needs us to be intelligent, measured, it needs us to be the voice of reason as well as the voice of faith. So let’s let St Albert be our intercessor and our guide in this, as he was for Thomas Aquinas, so that we too could be light for the world, salt in the earth.”
I’m staying with Jim and his wife Vickie out in Bayside this weekend. It’s beautiful, right on the bay, and the weather is going to be in the 90s! It feels like California in July. I’ll try to catch up on the blog soon.
