Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame

Chapter 1: A Bastion of Thomism

11 CHAPTER 1 A Bastion of Thomism JOE BOBIK AND THE POPE Joe Bobik was the first new colleague to greet me when I arrived at ND in the fall of 1958. Joe had joined the department two years earlier, having previously taught at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Within the next few months we became close friends. We played piano duets together (he was much better than I), went to restaurants together with our wives, and began making plans for a joint research project. Our coauthored “Pattern Recognition Mechanisms and St. Thomas’ Theory of Abstraction” came out in 1963. Although we saw each other less frequently as our careers diverged, Joe and I remained good friends until his death some fifty years later. Encouraged by our mutual goodwill, I once asked Joe how he happened to become a Thomist. My conception of Thomism at the time was rudimentary, but I knew it had something to do with relying on the works of St. Thomas as the best guide to philosophic truth. I had left Harvard with a deep suspicion of philosophic “isms” (idealism, pragmatism, logical empiricism), which struck me as ready-made answers to artificial problems, prepackaged for consumption by trendy philosophers. Why, I wanted to know, had Joe bought into the package called “Thomism”? Joe’s answer was immediate and unabashed. He thought Thomism had the right answers to most philosophic questions; and the reason From thomism to Pluralism 12 he thought this, Joe said, was that “the Pope said so.” This response was surprising, to put it mildly. I had never heard of people adopting wholesale philosophic positions simply because they were instructed to do so. Although our conversation soon turned to other things, I was left pondering questions like why a pope would instruct people to embrace a particular philosophy, and why an intelligent person like Joe would cheerfully comply. The pope in question was Leo XIII, author of the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). This document responded to a growing malaise in Catholic intellectual circles at that time over the spreading influence of the Enlightenment. Particularly troublesome to Catholics was the Enlightenment ’s unqualified confidence in the power of reason, its hostile attitude toward things supernatural, and its emphasis on freedom from the sort of authority popularly associated with the Catholic Church. A major theme of Aeterni Patris, by way of rejoinder, is that reason is limited to the realm of natural truth, whereas supernatural truths can be grasped only by faith through revelation. In the view of Leo XIII, spiritual well-being requires a proper balance between faith and reason which the teachings of Saint Thomas are uniquely able to provide. For reasons such as these, Pope Leo ordained that Thomistic philosophy should be adopted as the foundation for training priests in Catholic seminaries and for educating lay students in Catholic colleges and universities. In the words of Aeterni Patris,1 we are told that “the Church herself not only urges, but even commands, Christian teachers to seek help” from Thomistic philosophy. Thus supported by the teaching of the “Angelic Doctor” (Thomas Aquinas), the pope announced , Catholic scholars will be better prepared to interpret Scripture , to understand the church fathers, and to combat heresies and errors spawned by less adequate philosophies. Joe Bobik had various reasons for taking Pope Leo at his word. For one, he had spent several years in a seminary before marrying and coming to ND as a graduate student in 1948. Like all Catholic seminarians in North America during this era, he had been taught to view Thomism as the bedrock of Catholic theology. Another reason was that ND’s Philosophy Department was almost entirely Thomist when Joe arrived, which must have reinforced his conviction that Thomism A Bastion of thomism 13 was the best bet for a budding Catholic philosopher. A further consideration was that Joe was Catholic through and through. He had been in the church all his life and seldom questioned its teachings. Since Pope Leo had said explicitly that Catholic philosophers should rely on the teachings of Saint Thomas, “because the Pope said so” was exactly the answer I should have expected when asking Joe how he happened to become a Thomist. Having decided earlier not to enter the priesthood, Joe viewed the presentation of Saint Thomas in the classroom as his own sacred calling . He regularly taught courses for both graduate students and undergraduate majors...