The Mind’s Profane and Sacred Loves

The teachers you have make all the difference in your life. That they happened to come into your life at all and moved you to think and feel as you have can be understood in either of two ways: as luck, a matter of simple chance or mischance, or as the work of Providence, an essential part of God’s design for your temporal and eternal destiny. Allan Bloom, the professor of political philosophy who became for a spell the most famous intellectual in the world, believed that the soul’s reaction to accident, not a divine plan, shapes a man’s fate: How you respond to blind fortune and misfortune determines your mind and character decisively. Bloom was the most passionate advocate of the philosophic life, and every philosopher, he argued, is an atheist. 

As the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales professed: “One need not fear the gods.” One does need, however, to reckon carefully with other persons’ belief in the gods. The atheist philosopher’s superb indifference to divine retribution—which he knows does not exist—can subject him to rough handling by outraged true believers. While in the civilized world today such danger is limited—the religious maniac tends to visit his mayhem upon the mass of believers in another faith, not upon godless philosophers—that was not always the case.

The book that made Bloom a celebrity, The Closing of the American Mind, announced that the highest life available to human beings concerns itself with God only insofar as the religious fanaticism of the multitude impinges upon the philosopher’s freedom to think as he pleases. In less enlightened days than ours, such impingement could be severe indeed. Plato’s account of the last days of Socrates, sentenced to death for impiety, emphasizes the peril that perfervid religiosity poses to the philosophic life: “The Apology tells us that the political problem for the philosopher is the gods.” The philosopher worried about self-preservation must find a publicly acceptable way of talking or writing about the divinities in whose existence he disbelieves. 

For philosophy, argued Bloom, is inimical to the psychic complacency of ordinary men and women. It dashes to pieces the prospect of salvation, the ultimate happiness of the life everlasting, which has always been the mainstay of Christian belief: “[Philosophy] is austere and somewhat sad because it takes away many of men’s fondest hopes. It certainly does nothing to console men in their sorrows and their unending vulnerability. Instead it points to their unprotectedness and nature’s indifference to their individual fates.” What it offers in place of blessedness is “a happiness that has no admixture of illusion or hope but is full of actuality.” The ordinary world is alight with wonder when the philosopher with his extraordinary soul fixes his attention upon it. And those lesser men and women, the truest students, who learn from this remarkable being share, inasmuch as they can, his love for that riveting actuality.

To overcome the natural attachment to one’s most cherished but unconsidered opinions, to replace love of one’s own with love of the truth, as reason has revealed it, is “the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion.” It is the life of the mind that liberates, and doubt animates the intellect to take seriously “alternative thoughts.” “It is not feelings or commitments that will render a man free, but thoughts, reasoned thoughts. Feelings are largely formed and informed by convention.” Convention, the authority of political, religious, filial, or other powerful and deeply inculcated sentiment, must be defied. “The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor of individual human reason.”

According to Bloom, medieval Christianity tasked Aristotle with pious sentinel duty as “an authority almost on a level with the Church Fathers and . . . assimilated [him] to them.” This was an “abuse” of the philosopher, but a high-minded one: philosophy called to the aid of theology. And despite their obvious differences, theology was the next best thing to philosophy.

Older, more traditional orders that do not encourage the free play of reason contain elements reminiscent of the nobler, philosophic interpretation of reason and help to prevent its degradation. Those elements are connected with the piety that prevails in such orders. They convey a certain reverence for the higher, a respect for the contemplative life, understood as contemplation of God and the peak of devotion, and a cleaving to eternal beings that mitigates absorption in the merely pressing or current.

The greatest medieval commentator on and churchly appropriator of Aristotle was the Dominican priest St. Thomas Aquinas, whose formidable mental powers Bloom remarks on with admiration. For the Dominican priest Fr. A. G. Sertillanges, author of The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, the wisdom of St. Thomas is at the heart of the Catholic intellectual vocation. It is the model for spiritually fruitful thought. “The substance of this little volume,” he writes in the introduction, is “entirely Thomistic,” taking its lead from a letter “to a certain Brother John, in which are enumerated Sixteen Precepts for Acquiring the Treasure of Knowledge.”  

This treasure is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and its sanctity must be revered by the intellectual and aspirant to wisdom. “Knowledge depends on the direction given to our passions and on our moral habits.” Whereas Bloom enjoyed pointing out that in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle omitted piety from the ranks of the moral virtues, and that intellectual virtue, the source of the greatest human happiness, had nothing to do with moral virtue, Fr. Sertillanges insists that the serious intellectual life requires a soul morally strong. “How will you manage to think rightly with a sick soul, a heart ravaged by vice, pulled this way and that by passion, dragged astray by violent or guilty love?” The indispensable antecedent to intellectual virtue is piety. “The order of the mind must correspond to the order of things. In the world of reality, everything rises toward the divine, everything depends on it, because everything springs from it.” 

Theology, then, must precede and inform philosophy, which flounders without it: “Now that theology is unknown, philosophy is sterile, comes to no conclusion, has no standard of criticism, no bearings for its study of history; . . . it does not teach.” The hope for the coming generation is that it “will address itself seriously . . . to the science of sciences, the canticle of canticles of knowledge—to theology, the fount of inspiration and the only foundation of conclusive certainty.”  The Catholic intellectual’s foundational certainty could not be more different from the atheist philosopher’s. Bloom’s eloquent hortatory exalts the philosophic life as the only one that “can digest the truth about death.” The last thing Prof. Bloom ever said to me was that in the Phaedo Socrates “proves” that there is no life after death. “The philosopher always thinks and acts as though he were immortal, while always being fully aware that he is mortal.” That all human souls are in fact immortal is of course the bedrock teaching of the Catholic faith, and of Christianity all told—the cause of earthly joy or terror, depending on what one suspects might be his permanent destination.

The Catholic intellectual shares the belief of all other Catholics that with death, his true life is just beginning. To bring the blessed everlasting life to a world in dire need, the Catholic thinker can draw strength from the Mass, the form of common worship that imparts the sense of “a mission, a sending out of your zeal to the destitution of the mad and ignorant earth.” The ultimate truth about our life is not sad and austere but rich, beneficent, deserving of our devotion, and available to all.