Before we meet for the first time this Wednesday, I thought I'd try and do a brief sketch of how I see the course and its progress over the ten weeks.
One background assumption is that the course is going to emphasize intellectual exploration. That's worth highlighting because much exploration of Catholic social teaching has a practical orientation: roughly, once you've been sensitized to some key principles of the teaching, the main aim is to put those principles into action. Although I'd hope that what we do on the course may well have some effects on how we act in the future, any such practical effects will be the indirect consequence of an improved understanding.
Now I could leave it there merely as an assumption, but let me try to defend it as an approach. There are many things I could say here. I could point to the Church's (and particularly the Dominicans') long tradition of academic study. I could point to the Albertus Institute's own founding principle as aiming to provide
'...a forum to encourage an open dialogue between science, religion and other forms of intellectual discipline. It also offers opportunities for Christians and, in particular, members of the Catholic Church to enter public debate on these matters.' [My emphasis]
Perhaps a more fundamental way of defending the approach is in thinking about the importance of wisdom in Catholicism. In the process of sanctification (ie trying to make ourselves as close to God as possible) the development of wisdom is an important element. That doesn't mean necessarily academic study for everyone, but, given the conditions of a modern society, it will do for large numbers of people. So intellectual exploration of important issues is going to be a part of growing closer to God.
A second background assumption is that Catholic social teaching is important because it concerns almost everything about human nature. One of the worries I have about some popular presentations of Catholic social teaching is that they tend to isolate and restrict it. For example, you'll often read that it started in 1891 with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum. You may even get the impression that it simply concerns giving aid to developing countries. But Catholic social teaching (insofar as it means 'teaching on human beings and society') goes back to Scripture and uses political philosophy that goes back to Plato and Aristotle as developed over the 2000 years of the Church's history. One of the things I'll be trying to do on the course is to reconnect some of the more recent teachings on social issues with this older inheritance and thereby to understand it better.
A third -and final- assumption results from me and my background. My academic training is predominantly in philosophy and ancient Greek political and moral philosophy. That background undoubtedly affects how I see (and will teach) this course. First, as a philosopher, I'm more interested in exploring and arguing about the ideas than in providing clear cut answers. Given the wide nature of the subject matter I emphasized in the second assumption above, I'd expect us to emerge at the other end with a deeper understanding of some key points, but perhaps in some ways even more confused than we were at the beginning! That'd be a good thing: these are often complex issues and a bit of humility about our understanding of them is a key part of wisdom. Secondly, as a philosopher who specializes in Ancient Greek philosophy, I suspect I'm often going to go back to Plato and Aristotle in particular, as well as to how that tradition was developed in Catholic thinkers such as Aquinas. I'd give two justifications for that particular approach. The first is broadly pragmatic. There are any number of approaches you might take to Catholic social teaching. You might, for example, compare it with English language political philosophy such as that of Locke or Hobbes. You might compare it with modern neo-liberal thinkers such as Hayek or Nozick. (And I'm sure sure some of this will happen in the course!) But since Classical political philosophy is still regarded as an important source for political thinking, it is perfectly reasonable to take an approach which puts that approach and Catholic social teaching into dialogue -and it just so happens that this happens to be the sort of thing that I happen to have the background to do! The second justification rests on the way Classical Greek philosophy has been central to the Catholic intellectual tradition. St Thomas Aquinas has regularly been offered as a model for Catholic thinking -and it is impossible to understand Aquinas without reference to the background of Platonism and Aristotelianism from which he developed much of his theology and philosophy. Moreover, as Pope Benedict argued in his Regensburg address:
I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος [logos] ". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω [sun logo] , with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.
To summarize:
a) The course is going to emphasize deepening our understanding of Catholic social teaching rather than providing a recipe for practical action.
b) There's going to be a strong emphasis on developing that understanding through the philosophical and theological tradition of the Church, and through the roots of that tradition in Classical Greek philosophy.
Further reading:
You might find the following helpful:
a) St John Paul II's Encyclical on the relationship between philosophy and faith: Fides et ratio. Link.
b) Pope Benedict lecture on the place of reason and Greek thought in understanding God: the Regensburg address. Link.
c) Stanford Encyclopedia article on St Thomas Aquinas: Link.
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