Boethius, a sixth-century Roman statesman, was within the prime of his life when his political profession was delivered to a sudden and ignominious end. Running afoul of corrupt politicians, he was falsely accused of plotting against the king, Theodoric, whose favor he had long enjoyed. Boethius fell, literally overnight, from a lifetime of learned leisure into Theodoric’s dungeons. He was executed, but not before he had penned a piece that may reverberate across the centuries. The Consolation of Philosophywas one of the widely read books of the Middle Ages, a multiple-century bestseller. It cemented Boethius’s own legacy and taught medieval Europe the worth of the discipline that he loved.
The book opens with the hapless Boethius sitting in his cell, lamenting the terrible injustices of fate. He’s joined there by a wonderful woman, clothed in a wealthy but somewhat tattered dress, who identifies herself as Lady Philosophy, the personification of the pursuit of wisdom. She chides him for his self-pity and engages him in an prolonged discussion of free will, the vicissitudes of fate and the workings of divine windfall. By the tip of the discourse, the character Boethius has gained a greater sense of perspective on his situation. The talk reminds him of the bounds of human reason and helps him to trust God’s windfall once more. Lady Philosophy ministers to Boethius by meeting him where he’s, using his God-given intellect to steer him to a spot where he can relinquish his resentment and fear and find peace.
We could be fortunate to have such accompaniment today. We’d like that peace, desperately. Americans are as lonely, anxious and isolated as we now have ever been. In material terms we’re, basically, richly blessed; but socially and spiritually we’re impoverished. Our nation is dangerously polarized politically, and we now have diminishing trust in our compatriots and our government. The pervasive feeling of social disintegration makes the longer term feel grim.
Boethius would have related. Born into an aristocratic family in the ultimate years of the Roman Empire, he well understood how human potential might be blighted by corruption and social dissolution. He realized, too, that he was living on the verge of widespread civilizational collapse, and accordingly much of his life was dedicated to a sustained effort to mitigate the damage by preserving great works of philosophy.
What if this philosophic tradition is, in reality, the gift the world most needs from the church on this time of tension and doubt?
Boethius did greater than some other person to translate and comment on the works of Plato and Aristotle; it was his gift to a distant future that nobody could yet glimpse. Boethius’s final hours are that rather more poignant because we all know that we’re seeing the tip, not of 1 man only, but of a whole culture. Nevertheless, the Consolation just isn’t a piece of despair. Lady Philosophy’s comfort is accentuated for the trendy reader by the knowledge that Boethius’s dearest hope could be realized in centuries to come back. Europe wouldrediscover the good thinkers of antiquity, together with his own scholarly work serving as a vital bridge between the traditional and medieval eras.
But can ancient philosophy be the tonic that we want today? Some skepticism is forgivable. In our own day, we face gripping questions on social justice, identity and privilege, democracy and representation, and the desecration of the natural world. It is maybe hard to assume finding answers to questions like these in dusty academic tomes. Most Catholics are probably aware that their faith has a longstanding philosophical tradition, but the advantages of this tradition for the day by day lives of the typical Catholic might not be obvious.
What if it happened, though, that this wealthy tradition did contain, if not ready-made answers for contemporary problems, then not less than an area inside which answers might be fruitfully cultivated? What if it weren’t too late to raise our communities and universities into vibrant centers of Catholic mental and cultural life, harking back to their medieval forerunners? What if this philosophic tradition is, in reality, the gift the world most needs from the church on this time of tension and doubt?
A Home for Scholarship
Universities, in a form we’d currently recognize, have existed for the reason that Middle Ages, they usually were, to a big extent, built by Catholic philosophers. This will likely seem today like a little bit of trivia, however the footprints of medieval thinkers are still visible. At a contemporary university graduation, doctoral regalia still typically include a dark-blue tam, marking the colour of philosophy. We still callour highest degree earners “doctors of philosophy,” even in the event that they studied ornithology or hotel administration.
Faith and reason converged in medieval Paris in a way that proved transformative, not only for France and Catholicism, but ultimately for your entire world.
These vestiges of an older world should remind us how philosophy once created the university, at the same time as it shaped and defined the church. Philosophical knowledge is greater than just an abstraction. But for the medievals’ robust belief in the ability of truth, and the capability of human reason to uncover it, the university could never have been born. European Christianity could have developed in a more fundamentalist way, falling under the control of authoritarian patriarchs and corrupt politicians just like the ones who executed Boethius. Fortunately, faith and reason converged in medieval Paris in a way that proved transformative, not only for France and Catholicism, but ultimately for your entire world.
The undeniable fact that this happened in Pariswould have been quite startling to Boethius and his contemporaries. When Bologna founded the world’s first great law school in 1088, that was more explicable. Italy was still a hub of high culture, and it made sense to look at the foundations of law in the center of the old empire. Britain had already produced some leading intellectuals, like St. Bede and St. Anselm. France, against this, was quite removed from the traditional world’s great centers of learning; and within the tenth century, the Franks were widely seen as crude and culturally backward.
Nevertheless, by the tip of the tenth century, it was northern France that served as a magnet for intellectually curious men from across Europe. The cathedral schools became the gathering point for learned men and eager students seeking to follow the trail laid down by Boethius centuries before. They studied logic and great philosophical texts inherited from antiquity, they usually worked to use these skills and insights to the questions of their very own day. By the thirteenth century, the University of Paris was recognized throughout Europe because the pre-eminent institution for the study of philosophy, theology and the humanities. Medieval Paris was to philosophy what Fifteenth-century Florence was to art or Nineteenth-century Russia to literature.
The overarching project of the era was to synthesize every aspect of Christian faith right into a single picture, which could then be harmonized with every part else that was known, and even that could be known.
The Age of Systematizers
The University of Paris was thoroughly cosmopolitan, within the sense that it drew men from all across Europe and compelled them to subordinate their more particular loyalties and attachments to a bigger project. This was challenging. The students at Paris had their very own cultural and ethnic prejudices, as humans are apt to do, and these created tensions and infrequently even led to outbreaks of physical violence. Nevertheless, it was widely understood that the work of the university couldn’t be entrusted to a single national or ethnic group.
European civilization was hurtling right into a recent era, and mental labor was needed to pave the best way for a humane, prosperous Christian society. From a modern-dayvantage point, it may appear that the mental circles of this era were homogeneous and culturally closed, but that may itself be a narrow-minded view. It’s true, after all, that Europe on the time was largely agrarian and Catholic, and that the schools were mostly boys’ clubs. But this was also a time of political turbulence and rapid cultural change, and the momentum on the University of Paris was moving people awayfrom more provincial attachments and towarduniversal truths which are the common heritage of all human beings.
This was the age of great systematizers. The overarching project of the era was to synthesize every aspect of Christian faith right into a single picture, which could then be harmonized with every part else that was known, and even that could be known. The Scholastics of this era believed that every one truth might be unified, they usually planned to point out it. They understood that this picture would wish to mix substance and lucidity with broad-minded flexibility. They wanted a philosophy that would endure across generations, but that endurance could be possible provided that their theories could incorporate recent information because the human race continued to explore and discover. Accordingly, their thought tended to maneuver in wide arcs, making a framework but leaving ample space for details to be filled in later. Practical questions were sometimes addressed, however the system as an entire was designed to have an openness that may encourage further pursuit of information as a substitute of shunning it.
Without philosophy, Christianity might never have escaped the trap of fundamentalism. His life could have been short, but he definitely didn’t live in vain.
To anyone who has undergone a contemporary doctoral program, the medieval method of coaching philosophers is concurrently charming and astonishing in its ambition. Here not less than, medieval universities stood in marked contrast to our own. A contemporary graduate student, even within the humanities, will spend years taking deep dives right into a narrow and well-defined subject, with the goal of manufacturing some original research. Instead of the trendy dissertation, medieval graduate students would write full commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which is a broad-ranging work covering virtually every part of interest to a Christian scholar: God, creation, death, judgment, heaven, hell, the moral life and the sacraments. In brief, the University of Paris expected every scholar to jot down his own “book of every part” before he might be a full-fledged “doctor,” a scholar qualified to show. It was a system that really captured the spirit of the age. The Parisian intellectuals were determined to create a universally applicable philosophical view that would stand the test of time.
Did they aim too high? Was their zeal for consistency ultimately exposed as mere hubris, just the futile obsession of little minds? No human endeavor is ideal, and one can find mistakes inside Scholastic writings, as as an example of their faulty understanding of human embryology. Some texts would appear fanciful and irrelevant to us, like St. Bonaventure’s prolonged discussions of angelology. We is likely to be disturbed by the occasional moral judgment, as when St. Thomas Aquinas condones the execution of heretics.
Still, after we consider that we’re looking back across a gulf of several centuries, it’s remarkable how well Scholasticism still holds together. Most of it still seems thoroughly sane and applicable to modern questions. Neither modern science nor modern political developments have shown the Scholastics’ worldview to be fundamentally implausible. But their resolve was tested again and again, especially with the rapid rediscovery of recent Aristotelian texts within the thirteenth century. Preserved in lots of monasteries and openly discussed in Islamic mental circles by thinkers like Al-Farabi and Al-Ghazali, Aristotle’s texts eventually moved into the Parisian circles and have become the topic of furious debate. As a pagan with many profound insights but no access to Christian revelation, Aristotle pushed to the fore hard questions on the bounds of philosophy and the connection between faith and reason. Some religious authorities moved to suppress the study of Aristotle, fearing that philosophy would discredit or overwhelm the Christian faith. In the long run, the Parisian thinkers (especially St. Thomas Aquinas) successfully synthesized Aristotle with the Church Fathers, drawing in lots of other Greek and Islamic insights along the best way.
In the long run, for all their false starts and private failings, the intellectuals in Paris achieved a spectacular fusion of religion and philosophy. In so doing, they opened the technique to a Europe that was in a position to embrace human reason, exploring truth in all its many facets without rejecting God. If Lady Philosophy had been clairvoyant in addition to sensible, she may need given Boethius much more powerful comfort. Without him, medieval Europe might never have embraced philosophy to the extent that it did. Without philosophy, Christianity might never have escaped the trap of fundamentalism. His life could have been short, but he definitely didn’t live in vain.
It might be that Catholic philosophy was made for such a moment as this.
Joining Faith and Reason
In a fallen world, the victory of human reason isn’t complete. Fundamentalism will return periodically, as will political corruption, doubt, prejudice and plenty of distortions of the religion. Even Scholasticism, for all its admirable features, has the potential to steer people astray. It will possibly be reduced to a dry and formalist system, indifferent to lived realities and blind to the questions that trouble people’s hearts.
Over the past seven centuries, Catholics have again and again needed to renew their commitment to in search of recent truths and harmonizing all knowledge with the repository of religion. Time and again, lived experience has revealed places where older assumptions were imprecise, prejudiced or simply improper. Difficult and painful questions may arise, but Catholics cantackle these with the fearless audacity of the Scholastics, because we understand that faith and reason support and nourish each other. That joining of religion and reason is the legacy of Catholic philosophers, and it has all the time been foundational to Catholic education, reflected in Catholic universities and within the Ratio Studiorum that has shaped the Jesuit schools, which have had a particularly strong impact in america, from colonial times through the current day.
It may appear that that legacy has diminished in relevance, now that we live in a world with billions of individuals, scores of various faiths and a greater recognition of the array of cultures, races, languages and perspectives in our societies. However, it might be that Catholic philosophy was made for such a moment as this. At its best, it’s each precise and versatile, well-defined and expansive, practical and transcendent. It drinks in recent information, digests it and adapts the larger picture to reflect the reality more accurately. Since it is rooted each in logic and in natural commentary, it may well engage interlocutors from a big selection of backgrounds and perspectives. The Scholastics sought to rise above provincial attachments and articulate truths that were common to all human beings. That project seems as relevant now as at any time in history.
At the first and secondary levels, a variety of Catholic schools have been revitalized through the introduction of classical curricula. The rapidly growing classical education movement channels the spirit of the medieval synthesizers in myriad ways. It connects students to a longstanding mental tradition and seeks universal truths which are the common heritage of all humanity. It prioritizes breadth over specialized knowledge and robustly affirms the ability of reason. The growing demand for classical schools speaks to a widely felt need for sources of wisdom that may cut across the political polarization, mutual mistrust and social fragmentation which are so defining of our age. In an anxious world, it offers a beacon of hope. Perhaps we will, in spite of everything, find ways to reason together.
Might philosophy departments offer an analogous service on the university level? Imagine if Catholic universities were once more seen as a light-weight to the nations, replete with wisdom and ready to assist synthesize the numerous diverse truths that humans have uncovered across the centuries. We now have many resources for this, even beyond the wealthy tradition of Scholastic thought. We now have the contemporary tradition of Christian personalism, explored by thinkers like Dietrich von Hildebrand and St. John Paul II. We now have Catholic social teaching, which deliberately applies insights from antiquity to more modern social problems. We now have the neo-Thomist tradition, initiated in 1879 when Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical “Aeterni Patris,”calling on Catholics to recuperate the good insights of medieval thinkers. These are only a number of of many resources that Catholics can use, proving once more that the surest path to truth just isn’t the one which shuns or buries unfamiliar perspectives but quite the one which synthesizes insights from a big selection of sources.
After all, different people have a tendency to use the insights of Catholic tradition to different questions, with some specializing in social issues, others on on a regular basis spirituality and still others on questions in geopolitics, the environmental sciences or bioethics. But all of those questions could be approached with greater zeal and confidence after we understand ourselves to be part of a bigger effort that transcends the restrictions of our own place and time.
Within the depths of his despair, Boethius was comforted by Lady Philosophy and her balm of truth. This was a consolation that no earthly tyrant could take from him, and it remains to be available to us today. Our Lord offered an analogous promise. Though the nations may rage, and the violent plunder, the reality will finally set us free.