Here is some information to help youWhy Do Priests Need Philosophy? DECEMBER 27, 2014 BY FR. JAMES V. SCHALL, SJ
When he (Aquinas) was not sitting, reading a book, he walked round and round the cloister, and walked fast and even furiously, a very characteristic action of men who fight their battles in the mind. (G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.) 1 Here we are touching on what is the most important difference … between Christianity on the one hand, and Islam as well as Judaism on the other. For Christianity, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of the Divine Law. The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has to say the least, much less to do with philosophy than the sacred doctrine in the former sense. It is ultimately for this reason that the status of philosophy was, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in Judaism and in Islam than in Christianity: in Christianity, philosophy became an integral part of the officially recognized and even required training of the student of the sacred doctrine. (Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing.) 2 Over the years, I have been invited to speak at a number of seminaries—to St. Charles in Philadelphia, to Notre Dame in New Orleans, to the seminary in Bridgeport, to St. Patrick’s in Menlo Park, and I once taught at the Gregorian University in Rome. Looking back on my own studies, I have often considered the three years we spent in philosophical studies at Mt. St. Michael’s in Spokane to be the most interesting and formative ones of my many years of clerical and academic studies. In recent years, I have heard a number of professors in Catholic colleges tell me, though this is by no means universal, that much more real faith and theology exist in the philosophy department than in the theology or religious studies departments of their school. An army chaplain also told me recently that a Catholic chaplain has an advantage over the protestant chaplain who relies on scripture alone to explain everything. Very often the problem is one of reason and good sense, one that is more amenable to reason than to faith, as such. It belongs to Catholicism to respect both reason and revelation as if they belonged together, which they do. Here I want to talk about philosophical studies for the priesthood. I take as my models Msgr. John Whipple and Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, both diocesan priests in the school of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, both good priests and fine scholars. But first I would like to recall the lecture that I gave at the Bridgeport seminary several years ago. It was later published as an appendix to my book, The Life of the Mind. The lecture was called “Reading for Clerics.” In 2011, at the Theological College at the Catholic University of America, I gave a talk, entitled “Liberal Education and the Priesthood.” It was later published in the Homiletic & Pastoral Review.3 In both of these lectures, I wanted to point out something that I learned in a most graphic way from C. S. Lewis’ book, An Experiment in Criticism.4 The philosophic enterprise begins, I suppose, when we first take seriously the admonition of the Delphic Oracle. Socrates often quoted it, namely, that we should “know ourselves.” To “know ourselves” also means taking up Socrates’ other famous admonition, in the Apology, that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” But let us suppose that we, in fact, do know and examine ourselves, clearly no mean feat, as it is so easy to deceive ourselves about ourselves. Even with a good insight into ourselves, we still would not know much, even if we were Aquinas who seemed to know just about everything. We all remember that shortly before St. Thomas died, he stopped writing. He looked at all that he had written and realized that, compared to God, all he knew was “but straw,” as he quaintly put it. We could go two ways with this incident from Aquinas. We could decide that it was not worth the effort if, after a lifetime of study, we knew very little even about our specialties, let alone about ourselves and others. Or, as is much the better way, we could be delighted in knowing what we did learn, however minimal it might be, compared to everything out there available to be known.
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