Intellectum Quaerens Fides: Mortimer J. Adler’s Journey of Mind and Heart

Philosopher and educator Mortimer J. Adler’s affinity for Catholicism began in the 1920s, yet he did not become a Catholic until 1999. Reason and faith battled throughout his life; his long conversion process made Adler—a liberal modern individualist—a better philosopher and provided him an intellectual community, but his conversions to Christianity and Catholicism were, ironically, personal and emotionally therapeutic. He fell in love with Aquinas’s Summa Theologica in the mid-1920s, which transformed his subsequent work. That love grew even as Adler’s ethnic, familial Judaism, evolved into agnosticism. Due to chance encounters and historical circumstance his first important book, Art and Prudence, applied neo-Thomism to the topics of censorship and morality in the cinema. Book-related correspondence reveals Adler’s deepest attractions to, and hesitations about, the Catholic faith. Shortly thereafter his national profile rose in relation to promotion of the “great books” movement, making questions about Adler’s faith a public issue. His two spouses encouraged a long-term membership in the Episcopal Church beginning in the late 1920s, but Adler saw that as a mere affiliation until a 1984 illness prompted a full conversion to Christianity. Twenty-five years later, he converted again, this time to Catholicism.