Preface

A PROPER FEAR OF ARROGANCE might reasonably cause one to hesitate before exploring and crossing the boundaries that separate the various domains of knowledge. After all, each area of knowledge is vast in scope and requires a distinctive method or approach, and we all find ourselves harassed by the limitations of the time available to us for expanding our knowledge. Surely the lessons taught us by our work and by our enormously productive economic system confirm day by day the wisdom of specialization. Specialization in the workplace helps us see that we can best hone competence through discipline and through the repetitive practices that enable us to know deeper the intricacies of a craft or profession. We hear praise these days for people who are able to exercise what is called "compartmentalization," meaning that they maintain a careful separation of distinct aspects of life such as the concerns of family, the ambition of work, and the practice of worship. Efficiency is only a mediate value, always dependent upon an end for the determination of its true worth, and yet we all count upon it on a daily basis and feel hampered and irritated by its absence as we complete our necessary tasks, and living our lives in a "compartmentalized" fashion enhances our efficiency. We have many good reasons and many ingrained habits that encourage us to respect the familiar fences we have established in our lives.

What are we to think, then, when we observe once again, as several articles in this issue claim, that the Catholic intellectual tradition does not merely respect the legitimacy and relative autonomy of each area of knowledge, but instead insists that the presence and mark of the Creator permeates the world and overruns all human boundaries while faith correspondingly permeates the human person and overruns all internal separations of the self? How are we to understand the claim that all areas of knowledge are ultimately interrelated as they pertain to the created order and mutually illuminating as they pertain to the integrated person who seeks a deeper knowledge of God in the many different aspects of the world? Such claims, as I suggested, are made by some of the articles in this issue: that Christianity and modern science are not merely compatible but that Christianity in fact contributed to the origin of modern science; that the political order established in the world is not only the result of human plans and projects but can reflect in a mysterious way the communal aspect of the human person in accordance with our nature as bearers of the divine image; that the beauty we perceive through glorious sights and sounds in nature and in art finds its fulfillment in God; that history as an account of human achievement remains deficient if it does not also include within its reflections the deep-rooted piety that can be found embedded within every civilization.

Critics of Christianity and of Roman Catholicism in particular would not hesitate to call these claims arrogant and useless; after all, Christians insist upon speaking of "the way" and "the truth," and Catholics recognize the teaching authority of the Church. How is it possible, critics wonder, to speak of such things without arrogance? And Christians in their love of truth should be chastened by their critics when their critics show the many times when someone in the name of Christianity has claimed as absolute a truth that turned out to be merely relative or no truth at all. But Christians who love truth love logic and it does not follow that if sometimes claims to truth have been made by Christians that turned out to be based on arrogance or prejudice or a desire for power then all claims to truth made in the name of Christianity must be false. Christians should be chastened by the examples of arrogance that can be found in the history of Christianity but they need not be shaken to the core. For...