Making Common Cause with Men and Women of Our Age: A Thomist Perspective

The joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the men and women of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.

These, the opening words of the Vatican II document, Gaudium et spes, reflect what has long been a central element of the Catholic tradition at its best: an open-minded, generous spirit that is prepared to make common cause with humanity. This expansive and charitable spirit has by no means disappeared from our common life, and it is especially evident in countless ecclesiastical and lay initiatives on behalf of social justice and solidarity with the poor. But since the close of Vatican II, another spirit has come to the fore, a harsh spirit of critique exemplified by the encyclical Evangelium vitae, which asserts that Western societies are dominated by a ‘culture of death’. The sharp differences in orientation and tone between these two documents may be taken to exemplify two ways of construing a Catholic identity. ¹

The open-minded and inclusive spirit exemplified by Gaudium et spes carries its own dangers, as any active Catholic of a certain age can confirm. Open-mindedness can degenerate into lazy indifference to the intellectual integrity of the faith, and inclusiveness can lead to an uncritical embrace of the banal and sentimental elements of our culture. Nonetheless, in my view the spirit of condemnation exemplified by Evangelium vitae is worse. Of course the churches have a responsibility to engage in prophetic critique of the sins and the blind spots of the age, while at the same time safeguarding the central elements of our shared faith and way of life. But if we are to do so in a genuinely Christ-like spirit, we must discipline our prophetic critiques by confessing our own weakness and sinfulness, and qualify our witness to the truth with the acknowledgment of our own blindness. Otherwise, prophetic critique and faithful witness can readily give way to triumphalism and defensiveness—unattractive at best, and painfully inappropriate in many contexts.

The tensions between these two ways of construing our identity as Catholics and committed Christians are reflected in Catholic theological ethics. In the years immediately after the Council, moral theologians began to re-examine long-standing assumptions and claims central to their own field, with the aim of doing greater justice to the pluralisms of perspective to be found within, as well as beyond, the Catholic community. While there is much to criticize in the work of these early revisionists, at least they honestly faced the confusions and unpersuasive elements in the Catholic moral tradition. Perhaps inevitably, their efforts led to sharp reactions, both on the part of the magisterium, and from moral theologians and philosophers who set out to defend the tenets of Catholic moral teaching at all costs. These reactions, in turn, led to defensiveness or simple withdrawal on the part of many revisionist theologians, while effectively silencing the more temperate and nuanced voices among conservatives. For some time, the agenda for our field was set by these tensions, with the result that it became increasingly narrow and self-enclosed.

More recently, these tensions within Catholic theological ethics have begun to ease. Antagonists from the earlier period have more and more given up on one another, and turned to other projects. A younger generation of scholars has taken up a new set of issues, which cut through, and to some extent render otiose, the terms of the earlier debates. And the Council’s emphasis on social justice continues to bear fruit, not least in a growing commitment to what David Hollenbach calls ‘intellectual solidarity’, expressed through the common pursuit of a shared vision of the good life in a religiously pluralistic community. ² We are beginning to rediscover our traditional commitments to intellectual solidarity with the men and women of our own pluralistic societies. Nonetheless, Catholic theological ethics remains a relatively self-enclosed discipline. Those of us working in this field have been slow to undertake the kind of open-ended engagement with other perspectives that we could and should take up. To a very considerable extent, we have fallen into habits of reading mostly each other, and allowing very specific ecclesiastical or social aims to set the agenda for our work. As a result, we do not always attain the kind of intellectual rigor that can only come through engaging different, potentially critical interlocutors in a sustained way—and, by the same token, we fail to bring our distinctive insights to bear in open, appropriately critical conversation with others. And this is a loss for us all.

Throughout my professional life, I have taken the writings of Thomas Aquinas, together with other early scholastics, as the basis for my constructive work. These are of course among the perennial sources for Catholic moral theologians, but many of my own colleagues in the field (let alone anyone else) would find it hard to imagine that they offer promising starting points for active engagement with the perspectives of contemporary society. It is true that Aquinas and the other scholastics start from presuppositions, metaphysical as well as strictly theological, which many of our contemporaries would find hard to accept—but this, in itself, need not rule out a fruitful engagement between their perspectives and our own. The more serious difficulties, in my experience, stem from the way in which Aquinas in particular tends to be read. It is all too easy to read Aquinas’s thought as a self-contained system, complete in itself, providing the first and last word on every intellectual and moral problem, and therefore standing in need of no serious engagement with other perspectives. I understand this temptation all too well, since I sometimes fall into it myself. Nonetheless, it is a temptation—and when we give in to it, we do commit a kind of intellectual sin, against both Aquinas and our own contemporaries.

These difficulties are especially salient for me at this point, because I am currently focused on questions pertaining to legal authority and ideals of justice, which by their nature cannot adequately be addressed without some consideration of the actual beliefs, ideals and practices of one’s own society. Aquinas’s own views on legal authority and the virtue of justice cannot adequately be understood, without some sense of the intellectual exigencies and practices which set the agenda for his own thought. By the same token, if we are to take away anything of value from Aquinas’s views, we cannot simply repeat them, as if they could be applied directly to our own, significantly different legal and social practices. We need somehow to grasp Aquinas’s point, as it emerges in his own context, and then to ask how a similar point might be made in our own context. These process of interpretation and application carry well-known dangers, but there is no other way to read a pre-modern author as a potential source of illumination and constructive work. And these processes require some engagement with the views of our own contemporaries.

To put the point in another way, in my current work, I hope to think through key questions about justice, so to speak in conversation with Aquinas. A conversation implies that we make every effort to understand what Aquinas has to say, and to ground our readings of his own views in the relevant texts, seen in his own context. At the same time, however, a real conversation includes disagreements, as well as appreciative efforts to extend the insights of another in new directions. In setting up this conversation, I want to get Aquinas right, but at the same time, I am motivated by the conviction that Aquinas himself gets justice right, at least on key points. For that very reason, one can fruitfully extend and develop his insights in directions he himself would not have anticipated, in such a way as to be responsive to the exigencies of our own pluralistic societies.

Is this, after all, just another attempt to articulate a Catholic version of public reason, essentially secular in its outlook but couched, misleadingly, in theological terms? Briefly, no. After all, philosophers and theologians are engaged together on what is essentially the same project, a project shared by many other reflective men and women—namely, the project of making some coherent sense of the world as we know it, finding our place in that world, and acting in accordance with the best ideals we can identify. Naturally, our reflection will be shaped by the world that we see—even as our perceptions are shaped, challenged, perhaps overturned by the reflective process itself. Someone who believes—as I do—in a personal God, and hopes for her salvation, will see the world differently from a committed atheist. At specific points, our arguments may well follow similar analytic paths, and each of us will certainly be able to evaluate the arguments of the other by shared criteria of logical consistency, completeness, and overall cogency. Yet the overall shape and point of these arguments will be different—I will be concerned with a particular set of issues that might not engage my atheist colleague; some considerations will be salient for me and not for him; my overall thought will be shaped by a distinctive sense of what is plausible, persuasive, attractive and admirable. These divisions should not be overplayed—after all, all of us within a given society share to some extent in a common history and intellectual tradition, and we all, without exception, participate in the causal structures of a natural world, although we do not all realize it. Nonetheless, the philosophical work of a ‘Christian philosopher’ will inevitably differ, in both obvious and subtle ways, from the work of a secular humanist. To engage in reflection with either is to enter into a world-view.

Of course, we can and should distinguish between philosophy—even Christian philosophy—and theology properly so called. I simply want to caution against drawing this distinction in such a way as to rule philosophical arguments out of court for the theologians. We sometimes assume that a theologian is confronted with more or less well-defined secular or philosophical alternatives, to which she must accommodate Christian perspectives through some kind of supplementation or correlation, or else, which she must clearly reject in favor of a self-standing theological system of beliefs and practices. Early scholastic theologians, including Aquinas himself, would not have accepted these terms. Their aims and methods were oriented towards the broadest possible engagement with, and systematic appropriation of, the claims of diverse classical and religious perspectives, as mediated through key classical, Jewish, and Muslim texts, with the aim of integrating these into a comprehensive doctrinal system of Christian beliefs and practices. Certainly, Aquinas and his immediate interlocutors regard scripture as the starting point and final authority for all theological reflection, but, to them, the sacred texts offer an expansive key to interpreting and synthesizing the diverse strands of human wisdom, not a self-contained dogmatic system or narrative which stands over against any alternative world-view. Above all, they were guided by the fundamental conviction that the divine origins of wisdom, nobility, and beauty, and the Triune God revealed in scripture, are one and the same. They looked for evidences of this conviction in the mutually illuminating points of contact, and the ultimate congruence, among scriptural texts and the best insights of humanity—and, generally, they found what they were seeking.

Like every other theological method, this presupposes certain commitments, in this case, to the goodness of the natural order and human life as expressions of divine wisdom and benevolence, and to the unity of revelation as conveyed through Old and New Testaments. However, these are clearly scripturally defensible and in the most general sense orthodox, and it is difficult to object to them as starting points for a distinctively Christian theology. What is more, this method is especially well suited to a theological inquiry into the meaning of justice. Justice is quintessentially the virtue proper to us as social animals, disposing us to act well in relation to others—all those others whose lives are bound up with ours in a communally situated way of life. For this reason, any workable ideal of justice will necessarily imply publically accessible standards of justice, which either are, or plausibly might be, generally shared throughout a community. A kind of justice that can only be attained within a delimited association within the commonwealth can be said to be justice only in a qualified sense. Even in the relatively homogeneous world of high medieval Europe, the scholastics grasped this point—that is why they discuss the norms of justice governing relations between rulers and subjects who do not share a common faith, and defend the claims stemming from natural justice, even over against exigent demands of faith.

Few individuals and no society can avoid reflecting on basic questions of justice. These reflections lead on to arguments, and then to processes of discernment and judgement on a collective scale. Men and women of good faith will try, as far as possible, to participate in these processes from a standpoint of detached concern for one another and for the commonweal. But they will necessarily bring their deepest beliefs and commitments to the table, arguing with one another as the finite, socially situated creatures that we are. We Christians can only speak on the questions of the day from perspectives informed by our faith, in ways that may not always be apparent, even to ourselves. By the same token, we must be open to the questions and challenges posed by our interlocutors—all those who are prepared to talk with us at all, including the hostile and uncomprehending as well as the open and sympathetic. Through our participation in public debate and political action, we share in the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of our fellow men and women, while witnessing in all humility to a shared life beyond the boundaries of the public and political. Aquinas and his interlocutors do not offer the only resources for doing so, of course, but they do represent a tradition of theologically informed engagement with diverse perspectives that we would do well to reclaim.