Book Review

Nurturing a noble tradition

God, Philosophy, Universities: a history of the Catholic philosophical tradition

Alasdair MacIntyre lists three problems that are inescapable for theism. The first is how to reconcile the goodness of God with the evil in the universe. The second is this: if God is the cause of every happening, it seems that finite agents have no real powers. The third is that it seems doubtful whether one can speak meaningfully in human language of a God who exceeds the grasp of human understanding. MacIntyre sets out the problems bluntly and fairly, but he does not set out to solve them. Instead, he urges that the history of theism shows that a thinker can maintain faith in God while treating his existence and nature as philosophically problematic.

The first Christian philosophers discussed are Augustine, Boethius, pseudo-Dionysius and Anselm. These, however, are regarded only as prologues to the Catholic philosophical tradition. So too are the Muslims Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, and the Jew Moses ben Maimon, whose views are illuminatingly presented in one of the most valuable chapters of the book. For MacIntyre, the Catholic tradition really begins with Aquinas, whose teachings on the knowledge of God and the life of practice are expounded in two central chapters. There follow treatments of Scotus and Ockham, Vitoria, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Arnauld and Malebranche.

Between 1700 and 1850, we are told, Catholicism was effectively absent from philosophy. The history of the tradition resumes with Antonio Rosmini and John Henry Newman in the mid-nineteenth century, and with the launching of neo- scholasticism by Leo XIII in 1879. The story is rounded off with a consideration of John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio. 
Each of the historical chapters is clear and judicious, but a reader following the sequence begins to question the nature of the historical project as a whole. We seem to be offered a biographical dictionary of philosophers who were Catholics rather than a narrative of a coherent philosophical tradition. Is there really a Catholic philosophical tradition, in the same sense as there is a Catholic theological tradition, and as there are Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in philosophy?  
Many of the authors treated by MacIntyre disagreed with each other on fundamental metaphysical and epistemological issues. Even in the heyday of scholasticism, Aquinas and Scotus were as far apart from each other as ever Plato and Aristotle were in classical Greece. In the early modern age, Catholic Cartesians were in the opposite corner from Catholic Aristotelians.

We are told that this book originated in an undergraduate course that MacIntyre has taught at Notre Dame since 2004. One cannot help wondering whether this was the only course in the history of philosophy that these students attended. If so, they will have carried away a rather hazy view of the subject’s history, with Locke, Hume, Kant and Hegel left out of the picture.

On the other hand, MacIntyre’s remarks on the nature of universities, scattered throughout the book, are always interesting and insightful. Unlike Newman, he believes that teaching and research belong with each other, and should not be relegated to separate institutions.

He writes, “the schools that were the predecessors of universities had been primarily places of teaching and only secondarily, and on occasion, places of enquiry. But even in them it had been becoming clear that teaching, which is to succeed in making the resources of past learning available in the present, is inseparable from ongoing enquiry, from reformulating old questions, testing established beliefs, asking new questions, and so providing new resources for teaching. With the establishment of universities this relationship between teaching and enquiry becomes institutionalised.”
MacIntyre agrees with Newman, however, that in a university it is important that there should be a discipline that integrates the various arts and sciences, and considers the contribution that each makes to the overall understanding of the nature and order of things. Newman assigned this task to philosophy, but MacIntyre laments that contemporary analytic philosophy has become fragmented and esoteric, with no pretensions to providing a framework for other disciplines.

In the contemporary research university philosophy has been marginalised in two ways. First, it is treated as no more than one discipline among all the others. Secondly, its practitioners seem concerned only to address colleagues who share a technical vocabulary and an acquaintance with professional literature. Such philosophers, MacIntyre justly observes, inadvertently cooperate with a philosophically uneducated public in making philosophy appear not just difficult – which it is – but inaccessible – which it need not be.

On most philosophical topics there are commonly two or more rival and competing views. Professional practitioners argue for one or other of these views with great sophistication, but without apparently getting nearer any resolution of the disagreement. An outside observer, anxious to learn which of the contending views is true, is likely to conclude that it is something other than the arguments presented that determines why particular philosophers take one rather than another set of reasons to have compelling force.

MacIntyre himself has always been a splendid exception to the generalisation that philosophers have professionalised and trivialised their subject. He has always seen philosophy as a discipline crucial to human flourishing, one that concerns issues that are accessible to everybody. In his final chapter, he sets out what he sees as the crucial task for Catholic philosophers: to give an account of what it is to be a human being, an account that would integrate what can be learnt from both physical and social sciences. Besides setting out our relationship to God as first and final cause, such a programme would deal with the limits of scientific explanation, the body-soul-mind relationship, the acquisition of self-knowledge and the overcoming of self-deception. It would, in addition, set out the social dimensions of human activity and enquiry.

Such a programme, MacIntyre admits, is highly ambitious, and he is not optimistic about the possibility of its realisation. The project could only be carried out within a university, but the structures of the contemporary research university (whether secular or Catholic) are deeply inimical to such concerns. The only comfort offered in the book’s final line is, “in the life of the mind as elsewhere there is always more to hope for than we can reasonably expect.”

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