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Acquiring the Philosophical Habit
By Robert Sokolowski

"The finest outcome of a theological education would be the formation of a preacher or a teacher who spontaneously thinks in this way: someone who appreciates the nuances, contours, definitions, and shapes of important human things and can articulate them clearly; someone who has philosophical understanding, and who can also place these natural things into the light that revelation can bring to them; someone who can bring out the further truth that revelation adds to what we know by reason."

Why should philosophy be given a prominent role in theological education? Why should it be given any role at all in an academic program concerned with religious formation and theological understanding? It is hardly obvious, at first glance at least, that philosophy has anything to do with this. What has Jerusalem to do with Athens and the Bible with Aristotle? Indeed, is there not a certain tension between theology and philosophy? Philosophy and religion seem each to have a doctrine about the whole of things and about how we as human beings take our distinctive place within the whole. Each of them, philosophy and religion, pretends to tell "the whole story." But there cannot be two "whole stories," two comprehensive doctrines. The Christian teaching about the whole of things, about the comprehensive context, involves biblical revelation, religious tradition, authoritative teachings, and decisions of the church. Philosophical reflection does not start with such things. Indeed, it prides itself on quite the opposite, on thinking on its own and on not drawing its definitive inspiration from any single text. Would not philosophy be made tongue-tied by authority? Philosophy resists authoritative decisions in what it presents as true. Consequently, religion would seem to subvert itself and to question its own authority by introducing philosophy into its programs of formation. It would seem to be asking for trouble.

I

This is how things might appear at first glance, but in fact they are quite otherwise. Philosophy might pose such an intellectual danger to some religions, but it does not do so to Christianity. Far from being a

Robert Sokolowski teaches in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His publications include The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (1982).

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threat to the integrity of Christianity, philosophy can help Christianity define itself. It can play a positive, and even a necessary role in Christian education.

How can it do so? I will start with an example. Suppose we want to think about Christian faith. Clearly, this is a theological issue. But it is inevitable that when we think about the virtue of faith, and educate others about it, we must compare and contrast faith with beliefs we have about worldly matters. Whether explicitly or implicitly, when we talk about faith in God and in God's word, we will also talk about many related matters: what it is to understand what another person says; what it is to trust another person; what the difference is between learning something by hearsay and finding it out for ourselves; how it is that many different people can possess the same thought; how one person might be able to discover or originate a thought and communicate it to someone else; and how the thought, while remaining the same, can be transmitted to a third person; what the difference is between an understanding and the words used to express it; how a written text can embody the same thought that someone once expresed in speech. These are all philosophical matters. When we think and talk about Christian faith, everything we say is necessarily played off against the kinds of things I have mentioned, against the various elements and aspects involved in human speech, communication, belief, and trust. Faith is more than these natural things, but it can be more only because there is something for it to be more than. We could not just have the theological and the religious. We must also have that against which the theological and the religious are differentiated.

I started with the example of faith being contrasted with human belief. Innumerable other examples could be brought to mind. We could not discuss what the sacraments are if we could not also speak of human signs, commemorations, repetitions, and performative utterances. We could not speak of redemption if we could not also understand virtue and vice, enslavement and liberation, enmity and reconciliation. We could not speak of salvation without talking about human hope, the past and the future, and responsibility and choice. The theological things in question-sacraments, redemption, and salvation, as well as the church, the Bible, and worship--these theological things both build on and differentiate themselves from secular things. In discussing the theological things, we work with a distinctive range of new differences and new identifications in a new context, but the new theological context can be understood only as both blended with and contrasted to the original worldly context.

The reason why philosophy is important in a theological education is that it articulates the human and worldly things that serve as the basis and the contrast for theological definitions. Philosophy can bring out the integrity of those things that are important for a theological understanding. To return to our original example, a philosophical discussion of language, belief, trust, speech, and communication is indispensable in a

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discussion of what it is to believe in God and in God's word. It permits us a much sharper formulation of what religious faith is not: it helps us appreciate that Christian faith is not simply what occurs when people trust one another or when they understand and believe what others have told them. And in this process of showing what Christian faith is not, we can state much more clearly what such faith is, because the very recognition of the difference means that we have a better formulation of what it is in itself. The best way of clarifying something is to distinguish it from things that are very much like it, things with which it is apt to become confused. Of course, Christian faith, and all the other theological things we have mentioned or could mention, are more than reason alone can comprehend, but their very superiority to reason can be clarified in a positive contrast with what reason can do in the areas in which it is able, with its own powers, to clarify, distinguish, and define.

Moreover, the value of developing theology in this relationship with philosophy is not only an academic one. We might think that the chief importance of the procedure I have described lies in the help it can give to students and professors in clarifying their subject matter for themselves. We might think it will help the clergy and church teachers and administrators understand better what they are about. But this method of involving philosophy and theology can be helpful in preaching and catechesis as well. Even in that setting, it is important to develop the Christian truth by comparing and contrasting it with other human things.

For example, the Christian virtue of hope can be effectively presented in contrast with other forms of hope. One could begin, as St. Thomas does, by observing that we exercise human hope when we want something that is possible to obtain, but also difficult to obtain. If what we want were unobtainable, or if it were possible but also easy to obtain, hope would not be a proper response; we would either give up entirely or just casually expect to obtain what we want to get. Hope requires the conjunction of "possible but difficult." Furthermore, we can hope either in ourselves, in our own talents and efforts, or we may hope in someone else to obtain what we need. Hope can also be related to temporality, to the future, and to human birth and death. After we have developed such themes in regard to hope, we can go on to distinguish what is distinctive about Christian hope: what we hope for is eternal life with God; this good is possible, having been promised through biblical revelation and achieved for all of us through the death and resurrection of Jesus, but it is also difficult because of our inclination to sin. Furthermore, our hope resides not in our own efforts but in the grace of God, and it is distinctively related to our own future and our death. Such a development in a homily or a catechesis illuminates human things on their own terms, and thus helps the congregation or seminarians appreciate an important aspect of human life, the human sentiment of hope; it draws on their own experience in facing difficult situations and persevering in them. And then it defines the special character of Christian hope not by

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denying any of these other human things, but by going beyond them and giving them a completion and a form that they would not have in themselves.

Furthermore, such preaching or catechesis is not merely exhortational, although it will obviously contain an exhortational element. It exhorts, but it exhorts with understanding, and the understanding is part of the exhortation. The philosophical element, in this case the description of human hope, provides a spine for the discussion. It seems to me that the finest outcome of a theological education would be the formation of a preacher or a teacher who spontaneously thinks in this way: someone who appreciates the nuances, contours, definitions, and shapes of important human things and can articulate them clearly; someone who has philosophical understanding, and who can also place these natural things into the light that revelation can bring to them; someone who can bring out the further truth that revelation adds to what we know by reason. To someone who thinks this way, human friendship has its own integrity, but it is also illuminated by communion in the church; human vice and weakness have their own fearfulness, but they are more fully defined as sin; time and temporality have their own pattern, but are now placed against the background of eternity.

II

What should one study in a philosophical education? A good philosophical education must avoid artificial problems. It must address and clarify important things and distinguish them one from another. Moreover, a good philosophical education should clarify a lot of important things and not become paralyzed by a single topic. It should not try to address grandiose problems, such as "Why should I be moral?" or "Is there really an external world?" or "Could I really be just a brain in a vat?" Such questions have no context and, when stated by themselves, lead nowhere. They do not provide any food for thought. Instead of pursuing issues like these, students should turn their attention to much more modest things. They should, for instance, learn to distinguish the various forms of friendship; become able to discuss human deliberation and choice and the factors that either diminish or enhance them; know how to distinguish between the political good and the economic good; work out the differences between a text, the meaning of a text, and the interpretations a text can undergo; see the differences between a rhetorical argument, a mathematico-scientific argument, and a historical argument; be able to tell anger from hatred, vice from weakness, virtue from self-control. Just as in music or painting, everything is in the detail. And if the details are worked out properly, the grandiose problems will either evaporate into insignificance or take on a resolvable form. Furthermore, insight into such things as I have listed will stay with one throughout life. Such insights provide an intellectual ballast both for what we later read and for what we experience. Through knowing such things, we come to have a better sense of what is going on.

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There is a double reason for a student of theology to become able to make philosophical distinctions about important matters. There is the theological reason we have already introduced, the fact that theological things are best appreciated in conjunction with natural things. But there is what we could call a humane reason as well. In our general culture and intellectual climate, in the general opinions we breathe in and out, there is great skepticism and cynicism about such matters as friendship, deliberation and choice, action, virtue and vice, political life, and moral and religious truth. People generally will have their own private opinions about such things, but there is no intellectual and public consensus about them. A nagging feeling lurks in the background that they might somehow all be illusory, that they might only be the surface appearance of hidden impersonal forces of one sort or another, or that they are only cultural conventions, forms of behavior relative to certain groups of people but possessed of no truth of their own. Friendship, responsibility, virtue and vice, and even the phenomenon of life itself may, we fear, not be genuine, and the more schooling we get the larger our fear grows.

This cultural problem was addressed by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, in a lecture given at The Catholic University of America in April, 1986. The Cardinal pointed out a contradiction in our present cultural and moral situation. He observed that human rights are the basis for our public political discourse, but that we seem to be at a loss, intellectually, to say "whether it is at all possible to assert anything valid and fruitful about these fundamental rights." He spoke of "a sort of skepticism and misgiving toward rationality" and of "a suspicion which weighs upon our Western civilization and upsets its political rationality." He used the term "a lethal crisis," and said it exists not only for the West but for the entire world. He summarized the problem in this form: "Can anything trustworthy and decisive be said about humankind?" Or, in another formulation, "How [are we] to found human rights rationally?" This question, he went on to say, remains unanswered. The triumph of technological reason has crowded out the influence of any other sort of reason and has led us to doubt whether we can say anything at all about right and wrong, about human rights, and about what it is to be a human being. In a telling passage about the relevance of all this to the non-academic world, the Cardinal said, "The man in the street does not see things otherwise and knows that he is being mistreated. Because the average man or woman does not care about abstract principles until he or she has to face the consequences."

Cardinal Lustiger went on to provide several suggestions to help us cope with this cultural dilemma. I will mention only one. His first suggestion was "to acknowledge the value of what I have called philosophical reason or the philosophical exercise of reason." He admitted that this might seem at first to be a step backward after the great technological progress of the past few centuries. But be described this task not as a simple return to antiquity; it is rather, he said, a "new

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frontier for reason." We must recover the philosophical exercise of reason precisely in response to the triumph of technological reasoning: "Our reason must make new progress in order to become aware of itself and find out its universal relevance, especially in all the key areas where the technical rationality ignores it or deliberately crushes it."

In the terms I have been using in this essay, the task before us is to use philosophical reasoning to help restore, intellectually, the important human things that are now the object of such suspicion and doubt. This restoration would be a service to theology. How could we possibly develop an effective theological education if the human realm is not adequately restored? How could we say anything theological if in the natural order we could not distinguish the wise from the foolish and the heroic from the mad? But the restoration of the philosophical exercise of reason would serve not only theology, but our public moral and intellectual life also. Even in our secular education, we are being challenged to restore philosophical reason, especially on the collegiate level of education, as a complement to the technological, administrative, and bureaucratic education that has taken possession there. It would be most appropriate for the first steps of this restoration to occur in theological education. The cultural influence of such a move would be more significant than one might at first expect. It would be almost a hopeless task to try to bring about a change in an entire national system of education, but it may be possible to demonstrate what can be done by working within a smaller context, by cultivating the philosophical exercise of reason within our theological and religious education. If the problems could be well resolved in that smaller context, it may be possible to show more clearly what is lacking in our larger educational systems, and also to show what can be done about it.

Besides, where else ought one to begin? Religion is supposed to make us aware of what is sacred and what we should reverence. It speaks to us primarily of God, but it also speaks to us of those things we should reverence in our world and in one another, the things whose natures we must respect, the things we dare not subordinate to our purposes, use, and mastery. If religion helps us restore philosophical reason and to recognize the integrity of things, it will have exercised in an eminent way its own work, which is to bring us into the truth and to heal us. It will have spoken to us not only of God but of God's creation as well.

III

Let us now become very practical. What can we say about the specifics of a philosophical education? What can we say about the curriculum? In a philosophical education, we do not aim simply at providing certain bits of information or systems of knowledge. We must try to inform, but we must also try to cultivate a habit of philosophical insight. To think philosophically is not to become skilled at following a method or to become trained in applying an algorithm. It is to exercise a habit that needs to become part of the way we are. Educating someone to

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this end, helping someone to acquire an intellectual habit, is not a matter of simply handing something over.

Consequently, we cannot be satisfied with a couple of courses, or even with several courses, that are only randomly associated, that have little to do with one another beyond having the word "philosophy" in their titles. Rather, the courses must be interwoven. They will clarify different things, but they must do so in a way that allows the clarifications of one course to shed light on those of another.

In this spirit, I would suggest that a philosophical education should include four courses. One course would deal with human knowledge in its various forms, a second with human nature and human action, a third with the question of being, and a fourth with the history of philosophy. Ideally, each of these courses would last two semesters, and one of them, the course in the history of philosophy, could well last three or four semesters. The program would thus ideally involve twenty-four to thirty semester hours, but of course the materials could also be presented in shorter modules. Sufficient time is important. If only a few hours are given, the student might find out that there is such a thing as philosophical reasoning, but will hardly develop the habit of exercising it, and will not be sufficiently informed about the range and accomplishments of philosophical thinking.

The course on knowledge would discuss the rudiments of logic, the nature and forms of rhetoric, the way the various sciences explain things, the nature and the legitimacy of other forms of explanation, the hermeneutical description of the objectivity and identity of a text even in the various interpretations the text may undergo, what writing and reading are, and so on. The course on human nature and action would discuss the ethical dimensions of human action and character, virtues and vices, the various emotions, the definition of political things as opposed to economic, familial, and private things, the relationships of law, reason, and action, and the like. The course on being would discuss such issues as the distinction between the necessary, the usual, and the accidental, the distinctions between matter and organic and living things, the distinctions between human beings and animals, the difference between a person and an individual of a species, the sense of the divine that appears in human experience, the question of being.

In all of these courses, it is essential that we address important issues. Clever but marginal topics should not be allowed to predominate. The agenda for such courses should not be set by inherited textbooks or by controversies that happen to be fashionable at the moment, even if they are significant issues for professional philosophers. The purpose of these courses is not to form professional philosophers, but to provide an understanding of issues that are important both for theology and for human life and self-understanding. One may not be able to address all the important issues, but one can address a lot of them. Above all, one can help the student to develop the habit of thinking in the way that is appropriate in facing such issues.

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Besides the three systematic courses I have mentioned, there is also a course in the history of philosophy. In this course, the student should get a sense of the sequence of periods in Western thought: the ancient Greek and Roman period, Neoplatonism and the patristic era, medieval thought, modern philosophy and science, the contemporary scene. Each of these periods has features that distinguish it from its predecessors and successors, and some knowledge of the way they follow one another is essential for understanding where we are now. Knowing this sequence, even in general terms, is extremely helpful as a historical background for other fields of study, including theology. For example, a sense of the contrast between the ancient city, the two cities described by Augustine, and the modern state as described by Machiavelli and Hobbes is essential to understanding modern political society and the role of religion in it. To know Spinoza's understanding of the historical interpretation of texts helps to illuminate the nature of contemporary biblical criticism. To appreciate the difference between the ancient and the medieval understandings of being sheds light on what we now take as religious truth.

In this historical course, crucial texts should be read and explained, and the major historical turning points highlighted. Such historical study is not a mere accessory to the more systematic courses. It provides us with the essential philosophical information; it makes us wellinformed in the appropriate way. Without such a program in history, the systematic issues may seem to emerge out of nowhere and appear somewhat contrived; the very vocabulary for handling them may seem artificial. But a historical program without the systematic courses will collapse into a history of ideas, a picture-show of thoughts either edifying or startling, thoughts that will seem to be locked into the cultural period in which they emerged. The historical information and the texts would not readily feed into anything if a contemporary way of addressing the issues themselves were not also being pursued.

We cannot speak about philosophical thinking without mentioning something that seems always to accompany philosophy and is sometimes hard to distinguish from it. Even at the beginning of philosophy, Plato warned us that from some perspectives and for some people it is hard to see the difference between philosophy and sophistry. In more recent years, both Nietzsche and Derrida have been considered to be philosophers, even though what they assert would make the philosophy of, say, Aristotle or Kant to be meaningless. There seem always to be speakers and writers in the neighborhood of philosophy who use speech, meaning, and definition to assert that no speech, no meaning, and no definition can occur.

Clearly, the philosophical education I am proposing as part of a theological formation is not to be like this. Philosophy must raise questions, but questions imply answers and resolutions. There is something to be understood through the philosophical exercise of reason. Philosophy should help us reflect on the opinions we inherit, but

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reflection does not necessarily mean rejection, and clarification does not necessarily mean that what has been clarified will wither away. Indeed, if our "philosophical" thinking succeeds only in demolishing everything toward which it turns, we had better look again at what we are doing.

I mention this specter of skepticism and nihilism because there may be something appealing in it to some religious thinkers. Some may think that the best way to make room for religious faith is to show the inadequacy of natural effort. This approach could be called an apologetics through panic. It would induce skepticism in human knowledge and impute vice or weakness to all human action, and then claim that the only remedy for our distress is religious conviction. It is true, of course, that there is error and ignorance, and wickedness and failure, in abundance; but there is also knowledge and science, virtue, restraint, law, and justice, as at least partial remedies for the ailments that afflict the human condition. It would be unrealistic of religion to neglect the good in human affairs. And we can make important philosophical distinctions and definitions. The best proof, again, is in the details, in understanding the distinctions and definitions that have been achieved. It cannot be established by arguing the issue on the large and grandiose scale.

IV

In the few remaining paragraphs, I want to return to a point made near the beginning. I remarked that the philosophical exercise of reason might be a threat to some religions, but not to Christianity. Why this claim? Why should Christianity not consider philosophical thinking troublesome?

Part of what we believe as Christians is that human reason is not in conflict with our faith. It is part of our belief that we can be rational, that we can exercise reason to its fullest without threatening faith. This confidence in regard to reason stems from at least two Christian doctrines. One is that the God who redeemed us and is revealed to us is also our creator, and is therefore the one source of all truth, the truth of reason and the truth of revelation. We will consequently expect revelation not to contradict what the created world discloses to us. The second doctrine is that in the incarnation, the incarnate Word assumed an integral human nature. It was not the case that the divine truth somehow had to replace human reason and human truth. When human nature is elevated into grace, therefore, reason does not need to be replaced or denied. Reason is not changed into something else by the Christian form of life; it is perfected as reason by grace. In Christian faith, reason does not need to be abandoned, Likewise faith does not need, in its core, to be demythologized in order to be in harmony with reason. At times, it may be difficult to exhibit this harmony and these relationships in regard to particular issues, but as Christians we are confident that it makes sense to try. A lack of success indicates an inadequacy in what we have done, not a dilemma in the issue itself.

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The doctrine of creation is important in clarifying the relationship between religion and philosophy. The doctrine of creation is not merely one teaching among many; it is the point--or perhaps we should say the line-at which the Christian dimension emerges. The Christian doctrine of creation brings into focus the Christian way of distinguishing between the world and God, which in turn sheds light on how both God and the world are to be understood in Christian belief. In Christian faith, creation is understood as being done freely by God. Creation is not for the sake of God's own completion in any way. God did not create out of any sort of need. The world therefore might not have been. God could have been all that there is, and God's perfection and goodness would in no way be diminished.

This way of distinguishing between the world and God is central to the Christian understanding of the attributes of God-God's simplicity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfection, and oneness. It also introduces a new slant on the way we understand ourselves, on how we take our being in the world, our actions, and our destiny. Everything is seen in a new light when this distinction is introduced. This way of distinguishing between the world and God is the presupposition for Christian discourse about God and about our relation with God. It is also essential in distinguishing Christianity from other religions, from those religions in which the divine and the non-divine are taken to be parts of a larger whole. This distinction between the world and God has not in fact been achieved by reason alone, though it can be grasped by reason once it is revealed. Perhaps it can even be glimpsed by reason alone; other religious or philosophical understandings of creation can be seen as less radical attainments of what is fully given in biblical revelation. This distinction is different from other Christian mysteries, such as those of the incarnation or grace or the eucharist, for these are entirely beyond reason, though it opens the space in which these other mysteries can be believed as mysteries and not as paradoxes or incoherences. Perhaps this distinction could be called a mystery of Christian reason, while the others are simply mysteries of faith.

The Christian distinction, the belief in creation, is always engaged in all other theological discussions, just as, say, the question of human freedom is always in the background of all questions concerning justice, law, and political life. But the Christian understanding of the world and God becomes especially vivid as an issue when we attempt to formulate, as we have here, the place of reason in faith and the place of philosophy in a theological education. These topics prompt us to take what usually remains in the background and bring it to the fore. They prompt us to make creation and its logic the center of our concern. So our academic discussion about the place of philosophy in theological education has as its background the belief in the world as created by God and a belief in our reason as a gift that we can exercise in such a way as to serve and to approach the One who has given it to us.