The Catholicity of Reason by D. C. Schindler (review)

Balthasar is the guiding light in this illuminating book, but Schindler takes his cue from Benedict at Regensburg. “The courage to embrace the whole breadth of reason” is what is wanted in both philosophy and theology. Those who set false limits on reason generate imperial forms of reason. “It is not,” insists Schindler, “the grandeur of reason but its impoverishment that leads to oppressive rationalism and the arbitrary irrationalism inseparable from it” (x). The antidote is catholic reason, “ecstatic” reason—reason that, like being itself, it always open to what is beyond it.

If I understand correctly, the goodness of being is to be found in its openness to God, and the goodness of reason likewise, which means that reason is essentially receptive both of God and of all creaturely being. For Schindler, the mind is not (as for Kant) “constitutionally lonely,” but rather constitutionally engaged with the creaturely other and the divine Other (42). That engagement is what prevents, or ought to prevent, the false modesty that only produces a self-enclosed and, as such, a “totalizing” form of reason—a form that hardly knows what to do with beauty and mystery and volition and love. The latter starts in the wrong place, or rather forgets where it actually started—that is, with the experience (per Balthasar’s meditation on the formation of consciousness) of the mother’s smile. It is just such forgetfulness that renders revelation problematic, that removes the element of surprise, that turns reasons into a cold and abstract calculation.

What Schindler wants us to recover is a sense of the rational soul as a privileged participant in being’s own ecstatic character. Being, just because it is open to God, is always itself “and more,” as is reason. The intellect anticipates its object, as Socrates and Plato knew, but is recast in the encounter. There is an analogia mentis, we might say, that constantly takes reason beyond itself, just as the analogia entis takes being beyond itself. In this, the rational soul is indeed the very “paradigm” of being, for it shares in a privileged way in being’s being more than itself.

This kind of reason is not static but dramatic, and revelation belongs to the drama in which it participates—belongs to it primordially and in such a way that theology has priority over philosophy and metaphysics, yet without sublating the latter. This sounds, and is, a rebuke to Kant, to Hegel, and to Heidegger, against whom some telling blows are struck (not least in response to Heidegger’s posing of the problem of onto-theology, and Marion’s handling of it, too, for that matter). Schindler is not all rebuke, however, engaging his interlocutors (especially Heidegger) positively at many points. He does not suggest, as he might have, that perhaps their mothers smiled too little.

Following his mentor, Schindler experiments with the order of the transcendentals. Beauty leads and goodness and truth follow. Or, rather more traditionally, beauty appears as the confluence of goodness and truth, into which it leads us. He thinks we must correlate truth more closely with these other transcendentals and with being itself, finding its locus in “the concrete Gestalt” (105) and regarding intellection or understanding as a mutual act of being’s self-manifestation and of the receptive soul. (In a curious reading of Aquinas, De veritate q. 1, a. 1, he identifies truth itself as “manifestive and declarative being”[78].) We must also correlate all the transcendentals, and being itself with love. Even Thomists, he thinks, are prone to a fragmentation that tends toward a semi-Pelagian epistemology in which reason does its own independent work as a pre-condition for love and for the revelation that leads to the beatific vision. On his view, “the gratuity of revelation is intrinsic to, constitutive of, the integrity of reason, whether it be the revelation of being in its natural self-disclosure or the revelation of the triune God in history” (55).

Schindler’s treatment of...