Again, thank you for an enjoyable session last night!
A couple of reflections on the discussions:
a) Evangelization. One of the things I particularly like about Catholicism is that no one ever tried to convert me (at least in any obvious way). On the other hand, I've been approached by who knows how many other groups of one ideology or other who want to convince me to sign up to their particular understanding of the world.
Now this reticence does have its bad side: in part because Scottish Catholics in particular have learned to keep their heads down in an environment that, in the not so recent past, was extremely hostile, I sometimes think we are too reticent about what we believe. But I think there are two good reasons which might explain the lack of apparent effort:
i) You don't get anywhere by bludgeoning people. If we take seriously the claim I made last night that the emphasis on truth and love in achieving our supernatural end (ie the beatific vision of God) militates against the imposition of the good life by the State, I think it's also true that (in the majority of cases) going up to a stranger and asking if they're saved also doesn't work. (It's a bit like trying to find a boy/girl friend by slipping notes to strangers and asking if they'll go out with you: it might work on occasions, but usually you'll just get a reputation as a bit creepy!)
ii) Being 'saved' isn't just a decision. Some non-Catholic Christians do think (or at least seem to think) of salvation as just an event: you are asked if you want to accept God; you say yes and accept God. End of story. Instead, Catholics think of being saved as a process which ends in the Beatific Vision of God: both God's grace and our co-operation with that grace are required for that process to succeed. (And that process may well involve a period of post-mortem cleansing in Purgatory.)
From this perspective, the sort of discussions we are having are part of that process: again, if we think of the pursuit of God as characterized by truth and love, a free pursuit of truth and understanding is likely to be rather more important an element in sanctification than a brief exchange on a doorstep.
I'm saying all this because I suppose I do wrestle with the practical implications of this every day when teaching philosophy in a secular environment but also in these classes. In one sense, I never think of myself as evangelizing: I'm not trying to convert anyone to Catholicism even in these classes which are explicitly Catholic (at least in the sense that they are about Catholicism even if we are not all Catholics!). I'm merely concerned to try and pursue truth (and goodness and beauty). On the other hand, I do think (and hope) that such a pursuit does lead (in principle even if not always in fact) to Catholicism. (Whether any of this is the right attitude is of course another question!)
Reading I've found useful in this area (but I'm certainly not pretending to a complete understanding here!):
Council of Trent, Sixth Session: On Justification [link here]
Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification [link here]
Garrigou-Lagrange: The Three Ages of the Interior Life (a book by perhaps the most eminent neo-Thomist of the twentieth century: chIII article III deals with the relationship between the effects of grace (the infused virtues) and the virtues acquired by our own efforts. [Link here.]
b) Disagreement. Sticking with this emphasis on the pursuit of God as understood as characterized by truth and love, I see no reason to expect that such a pursuit shouldn't be aided by argument and disagreement. I think of Catholic social teaching as really Catholic political philosophy, and it's absurd to think of philosophy as pursued without some sort of argument and disagreement. I'll quote the Dominican, Timothy Radcliffe here:
'The conviction which I explore in this letter to the Order is that a life of study is one of the ways in which we may grow in the love which "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." (1Cor. 13:7)
[...]
'In part it is because we are marked by a culture which has lost confidence that study is a worthwhile activity and which doubts that debate can bring us to the truth for which we long. If our century has been so marked by violence it is surely partly because it has lost confidence in our ability to attain the truth together.
[...]
'We can never build community unless we dare to argue with each other. I must stress, as so often, the importance of debate, argument, the struggle to understand.'
[Extracts from: Radcliffe: 'The wellspring of hope' (link here).]
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