Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals

Chapter 10: The Faith of a Theologian

c h a p t e r 1 0 The Faith of a Theologian avery cardinal dulles, s.j. I n the letter inviting me to accept the Marianist Award for the year 2004, your president, Dr. Curran, suggested that I might take the occasion to speak of the relationship of faith to my own scholarly work. The proposal immediately captured my fancy since faith and theology have been, so to speak, the two poles of my existence. The subject, besides, has considerable importance for our time and place, because many of the difficulties we experience in Church and society are due to the impoverishment of faith or to theology that is not in harmony with faith. From their first beginnings my religious convictions have been intimately bound up with my intellectual life. In my prep school days, whatever faith I had was eroded by instructors, assigned readings, and personal study. The evidence available to me seemed to indicate that if God existed at all, there was no real function for such a being. Everything seemed to be explicable in principle by natural causes and human agency. The study of human and cosmic origins, I believed, had done away with any need for the hypothesis of a Divine Creator or of a Provident Governor of the Universe. The materialistic evolutionism that captivated me in those years is still widespread in our day and seriously harmful to faith. In my first years in college the question that continually haunted me was whether my life had any real meaning. Were human beings with their rationality misfits in the universe? Was reason a source of alienation in a universe that existed without meaning or purpose? I Believing Scholars 152 was almost prepared to admit that it was foolish to ask the question why anything existed, since objective reasons were a figment of the mind. But my study of Greek philosophy rescued me from this dismal conclusion. Plato gave good grounds for holding that mind, not matter , was at the origin of all things. Aristotle made it clear that the laws of reason were in conformity with those of being. What was absurd in logic was impossible in reality. From this it followed that there was a correlation between being and intelligibility. The more being a thing had, the more intelligible it was. Matter, as the lowest grade of being, was only minimally intelligible. In this way I was able to turn materialism on its head. I was particularly concerned with the moral order. Was it reasonable to respect the rights of others when it did not suit one’s own convenience? Could I be morally obliged to sacrifice my own advantage and even my own life for the sake of some higher good? Plato convinced me that such sacrifices could be commendable and indeed mandatory. It was always better, he said, to suffer evil than to do evil. As soon as I accepted that principle I became convinced that the moral order had a transcendent source. An absolute obligation could come only from an absolute being. And it seemed reasonable to hold, as Plato surmised, that virtue would be rewarded and vice punished in a future life. The logic of Plato’s position pointed to something very like the Christian God. Right reason therefore opened up for me the path to faith. Although I took several philosophy courses in college, I was not a philosophy major. My field of concentration was the cultural history of medieval and Renaissance Europe. This branch of study made me conscious that all the cultural and political institutions of the West were deeply indebted to the great Christian civilization of the first millennium. That civilization was built on two pillars: the natural wisdom of Greece and Rome and the revealed religion of the Bible. The combination of the two was immeasurably richer than either taken in isolation. Biblical revelation in many ways completed and confirmed the philosophical probings of Greece and Rome. Conversely, the early Christians, seeking to understand what they held by faith, received inestimable help from the wisdom of pre-Christian antiquity. The Faith of a Theologian 153 During my four years in college I did not take a single course in religion or theology, but I learned a good deal about both through history, literature, and the arts. I found deep spiritual nourishment in reading Augustine, Bernard, Thomas...