The Christian Intellectual Tradition

The other day I did a post featuring a description of the Neo-gnostic currents of ideology that are so dominant among the Ruling Class in modern America. While these ideologies obviously involve the manipulation of concepts--often to an excessive degree of complexity, with resort to outlandish neologisms--they are actually characterized by a desire to conform reality to the human will, either in the form of escapism or, as we see increasingly, a demonic will to power. As such, despite the excessive rationalism they exhibit--the conceptual gymnastics--these ideologies are actually anti-intellectual in this sense: the use of conceptualism is about escapism or domination, but in neither case about deep and sympathetic understanding of reality.

Today at the same site that I linked (above) Peter Kwaśniewski--another traditionalist Catholic thinker--has an article that describes the alternative to Neo-gnostic ideology: What Is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition? Before quoting several of the basic elements of this intellectual tradition--or perhaps, better, this tradition of intellectualism that seeks to unite the understanding to reality in a sympathetic fashion--I'd like to suggest two points of reference for readers in evaluating what Kwaśniewski has to say.

The first point of reference is the thought of C. S. Lewis. I suspect many will be familiar with one or more of Lewis' books. Lewis himself, of course, was a noted intellectual as well as a committed Christian and championed in his books the Thomist style of intellectualism that came down through the likes of Anglican thinkers like Richard Hooker.

The second point of reference is simply the experience of each reader. My contention is that these essentials of intellectualism reflect what we could call the overall spirit of the American tradition--a tradition of reasonability and of an embrace of reality that unites the American tradition with the intellectual tradition of the West while setting it apart from Neo-gnostic ideologies. I'm thinking here of something along the lines of Russell Kirk's Roots Of American Order.

I realize that, historically, this may appear to be an over simplification. However, I'm not attempting here a detailed demonstration but simply a kinship of spirit, of intellectual approach, as distinct from the dominant ideologies of our Ruling Class that so violently reject the intellectual tradition of the West.

So, here we go, in severely abbreviated excerpts. I offer this for those who are seeking to consciously define where they stand as opposed to the currently dominant forces that seek to transform us into their image and likeness.

The Catholic Intellectual Tradition possesses a number of stable, recognizable characteristics:

1. 1. The profound harmony of faith and reason, ... Faith and reason are not only compatible, but mutually purifying and assisting. ...

1. 2. A natural law ethic based on the inherent dignity of the human person as created in the image and likeness of God, offering the only objective foundation for a coherent doctrine of human rights and duties; and following from this, an emphasis on moral liberty (“freedom for”) as more important than physical liberty (“freedom from”)—crowned by the freedom to find and adhere to God.

1. 3. The recognition that man is an integral being made up of body and soul: he is his body and his soul in their dynamic unity, and therefore his body is not mere property (much less anyone else’s property) but part of himself, endowed with dignity, and the subject of rights and duties. Catholics are the greatest and last champions of matter, nature, sexuality, and the value of life. [Here, the clear contrast is to the ideologies that regard the body as not a true part of the self but something to be chosen and shaped by our own desires.]

1. 4. Respect for the Christian Tradition as such and for its great voices: ... We revere and follow what has been handed down because it is a treasure and an inheritance, as befits children of one family.

1. 5. ...

Skepticism toward tradition

In our times, the very concept of “the Catholic Intellectual Tradition” has come under fire. Many question the value of any tradition, of anything handed down from the past. Modern men need modern things, so the opinion goes; our world is too different from that of earlier ages, and the answers that satisfied them cannot satisfy us. Such a view overlooks and underestimates the naturalness and importance of tradition, and why Catholics should be especially grateful for their own tradition.

The intellect of man, like man himself, is social. We are not born autonomous, on our own two legs and ready to face the world; we are born into the “social womb” of the family, from which we learn our language, our habits, our loves, our way of interacting with others and the world. Just as it is not good for man to be alone, it is not good to think alone, and in fact, we cannot do so. ...

...

Postmodern power plays

The importance of the intellectual life—of thought aimed at truth—is nevertheless viewed with suspicion by postmoderns. Isn’t “truth” whatever the powerful have decided to impose on the rest of us? Some people are not so sanguine about the possibility of the search for and discovery of timeless truth. The response we can make is to point to the inseparable relationship between truth, human identity, and personal dignity.

As Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and countless other lights of the Church teach us in their lives and in their writings, and as the pagan philosophers Plato and Aristotle and many others had seen before them, truth is the proper object of the human mind—it is the good of the intellect. It is precisely when we do not adhere to this good that we are flung into a roiling ocean of selfish claims and manipulative desires. If we do not constantly seek this good, we are abdicating what is most distinctive in our humanity. If we do not strive to share this good with our fellow human beings, we are not loving them.

In this sense, the opposite of an intellectual tradition is not sentimentalism or aestheticism, but anti-intellectualism, or what Socrates called “misology”: an impatience of or contempt for sound reasoning, the denial of conscience, the abandonment of self-consistency, reckless self-promotion regardless of the cost to others, a utilitarian outlook on life, the denial that there is anything special or unique about man. Downstream from these views, and collecting their pollution, lies nihilism, characterized by an oppressive will to power. In the absence of truth, there is only the assertion of force and passivity to it.