I’m glad to get beyond snarkiness ;-)

What’s also ironic here is that I regularly hear folks complain that my book is “too Catholic!” So that shared Catholic sensibility will mean there’s significant overlap in our approach to these matters. (Though it’s interesting that the Catholics who are an important part of Desiring the Kingdom–Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor–don’t get much airplay in Return to Rome.)

What interests me in Desiring the Kingdom is a reductionistic construal of Christian faith in terms of a “worldview” which then equates it with the philosophical. And it seems to me that your quote above still does that. While you rightly note that the Christian worldview is “derived from” communities and institutions, what I’m contesting is the identification of Christian faith as a “philosophical tapestry”–and more specifically, I’m concerned about the effects such a reduction/identification has on the way we think about Christian education.

But we might be just rehearsing old debates between Augustinians and Thomists (here at the “evangelical” blog of First Things! Times have indeed changed.) I hope sometime you might have opportunity to read the fuller articulation of the argument in the book where I think the issues are presented with more nuance. (“Nuance” is not the blogosphere’s forte.)

(BTW, I just reread what I wrote above, and I seem a bit snarky. I do apologize for that. It didn’t seem that when I wrote it).

It’s funny you should think of my story as “intellectualist” when I have received just the opposite criticism from some bloggers, one of whom took this portion of my book and ran with it:

Although it may be difficult to detect from much of what I have written in this book, my return to the Catholic Church had as much to do with a yearning for a deeper spiritual life as it did with theological reasoning. Since becoming Catholic, I have become much more prayerful, I read the Bible far more often, and I am increasingly more aware and appreciative of the grace God has given me to live a virtuous life. I sometimes find myself silently praying a “Hail Mary” or an “Our Father” while driving or working out. I am not averse to asking particular saints to pray for me, or to recite the prayers of some of my favorite saints, such as St. Thomas Aquinas. When doing this I gain a greater sense of that which I am a part, the wonderful Body of Christ that transcends time, space, and death itself. Since becoming Catholic I have participated in such practices as praying the rosary and praying the Stations of the Cross. These practices are rich and good, but the sacrament of reconciliation (or confession) has been the most liberating aspect of my Catholic experience so far. Although many Catholics acquire a deeper walk with God through the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, I have found confession to be the place in which I experience the gratuitous charity of our Lord at its fullest.

This is what that blogger wrote: “In the end, Beckwith confesses that a deep spiritual yearning ultimately led him back to Rome, not theological reasoning. Return to Rome would have been better had Beckwith given us more insight into Rome’s satisfaction of his spiritual yearnings instead of the doctrinal issues that he admits were not the primary factor in his decision to return to Rome.” ( http://trevinwax.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/frank-beckwiths-journey-back-to-roman-catholicism/ )

I think I’m pretty clear in the To Everyman An Answer intro that Christianity requires more than mere ideas and doctrines, but institutions and communities as well. As I write,

What we mean is that the Christian faith is a philosophical tapestry of interdependent ideas, principles, and metaphysical claims that are derived from the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures as well as the creeds, theologies, communities, ethical norms, and institutions that have flourished under the authority of these writings.

Yes, doctrines and ideas are there. But they are organically connected with Scripture, creed, theology, community, and ethical norms.

I understand what Professor Smith is trying to say and what sort of point of view he is critiquing. And in some respects, I agree with him. And this is precisely why I did not isolate doctrines and ideas from institutions and communities. In fact, I would argue that to treat ideas and doctrines as somehow not derivative from communities and institutions is in fact to engage in the sort of reductionism that Professor Smith rightly rejects.

For me, one of the joys of being Catholic is that the communion of saints includes St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis, and that I can engage in intellectual reflection while complementing it with contemplative prayer, the Mass, and other sorts of devotions. I can have my mind and leave it too. :-)

I was hoping you’d be reading and would chime in. Thanks for doing so. I for one really appreciate the time you’ve spent on this.

This conversation has made me wonder about the overlap between the critiques of “intellectualism” in your book and the criticisms of substance dualism. I think the confusion comes on page 32, right after you quote Dr. Beckwith. (Sorry to quote you to yourself–it’s mostly for everyone else’s sake.) You write:

“Such construals of worldview belie an understanding of Christian faith that is dualistic and thus reductionistic: It reduces Christian faith primarily to a set of ideas, principles, claims, and propositions that are known and believed. The goal of all this is “correct” thinking. But this makes it sound as if we are essentially the sorts of things that Descartes described us to be: thinking things that are containers for ideas. What if that is actually only a small slice of who we are? And what if that’s not even the most important part? In the rationalist picture, we are not only reduced to primarily thinking things; we are also seen as things whose bodies are nonessential (and rather regrettable) containers for our minds. This is why such construals of a Christian worldview are also dualistic: they tend to assume a distinction between our souls and our bodies–and then tend to ignore our embodiment (or wish it weren’t there). But what if our bodies are essential to our identities? Weren’t we created *as* embodied creatures? What if the core of our identity is located more in the body than the mind?”

I am quite sympathetic to your take on the body here (as my forthcoming book will hopefully demonstrate–a phrase that still fits rather awkwardly on me, I’m afraid). But you do seem to make the jump–not explicitly with Beckwith, but certainly with others who think like him–from the “intellectualist” epistemology to the Cartesian dualism. The only problem with that is that I can’t think of a dualist alive who is a Cartesian (perhaps you can), at least in what they say publicly.

My only point here is that I wonder whether there actually is an organic connection between “intellectualist” visions of Christianity and dualism. It seems like, at least theoretically, one could be a materialist with respect to human persons and still adhere to an intellectualist vision of the faith. In other words, is the relationship between them more correlation than causation?

More food for us all to chew on, I suppose.

Best,

Matt

Dr. Smith said that the idea that Christianity is a belief system is dualistic and reductionistic. And I don’t think that anything in the paragraph you quoted shows that you don’t think this (you do, after all, pretty clearly say that that paragraph is one of the propositions that is part of the Christian worldview). So you haven’t really convinced me, at least, that he’s misrepresented your views.

I think one gets a similar “intellectualist” version of Catholicism in _Return to Rome_, but I won’t pursue that here. (I’ll raise that concern in a forthcoming review of that book.)

But I don’t anywhere suggest that Prof. Beckwith is a Cartesian dualist. He is indeed a dualist of the Thomistic variety.

Thanks for the helpful “review of the reviews.” Prof. Smith is going to respond tomorrow, and I may try to point out some of those in my response to him. There was lots more I could have said, but I really did try to find things that not everyone had (yet) talked about.

Albert,

Thanks. The category actually is Smith’s use, not my own. But he points to Aristotle’s use of it in the Politics, where he describes the constitution of a city as a formal cause in the sense I have above. So for Aristotle, it seems form can take different roles depending upon the context. Properly speaking, I think your point is right and its use in the Politics is analogy.

Dr. Beckwith,

That’s good to know, and thanks for pointing it out. One of the interesting things about Biola and the folks there is that everyone is claiming Thomas and repudiating Descartes. JP does it too in Body and Soul. And I think that’s an important point to make, if only because we need to take (I think) the way people describe their own projects and ideas seriously.

It might be the case that Dr. Smith is making a polemical point to tease out the differences in his view, which I think is appropriate. But it does obscure the many similarities between the ‘rationalists’ and his own approach, similarities that I think make us much closer than he thinks (as I said).

But then, I might just want everyone to get along, too.

But all the repudiation of Descartes by EVERYONE (and I’ve done it too) makes me want to defend the poor guy. He did, after all, think that he was doing the Kingdom a good turn in Meditations.

Best,

Matt

Until recently, I had not known that Smith had quoted me in his book and suggested that I was, of all things, a reductionist Cartesian. Too bad he didn’t bother to read the rest of that introductory chapter, that includes this paragraph:

“Second, God created human beings in his image. A human being is not merely a collection of physical parts but has an underlying unity or soul. A human being’s life is sacred from the moment that human being comes into existence; the value of a human being is not something acquired when he or she reaches a certain level of physical complexity, as many secular thinkers maintain. Because human beings are moral agents, they have the capacity to make decisions and judgments within the larger framework of family and community. Thus, for the Christian worldview, marriage, government, and church are not merely social constructions that can be shaped in any way consistent with some utopian vision of justice, but rather, are natural institutions in which and by which human beings ought to learn what is good, true, and beautiful. However differently expressed throughout human history and/or better understood as the result of moral reflection, they are part of the furniture of the universe and their continued existence is essential to maintaining the moral ecology of human society. Thus, the end of the community should be to produce good citizens and therefore provide a privileged position for these natural institutions.”

That’s Aristotelean-Thomism, not Cartesian reductionism. Smith got his “money quote,” but at the expense of misrepresenting my views.

Just wanted to make sure that you knew that Smith mischaracterizes my views.