Pope John Paul II:   
The Philosopher Pope

By Fr. James Fannan, PIME

God said to the prophet Jeremiah: "For it is I this day who have made you a fortified city, a pillar of iron, a wall of brass, against the whole land ... they will fight against you, but won’t prevail over you …." (Jer l:18-19) This prophetic role of the Church stands out particularly in the ministry of the Pope as one called to challenge the challengers of the faith, and not infrequently these challenges are from the philosophers. Also in this area, Pope John Paul II has had a notable impact. Besides writing many articles in this field before he became Pope, even afterwards he had a particular awareness of this area of human endeavor and even wrote an encyclical Fides at Ratio which recognized the importance of the role of philosophy and faith in Catholic thought.

In his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, the Pope also made some brief, but profound observations on philosophical matters. The book is designed as an interview with a question and answer format and is addressed to the ordinary educated reader. The question the Pope addressed in one significant chapter is this: What has become of the ‘History of Salvation’? This history of salvation is history observed from the standpoint of God’s salvific actions in our history. How far reaching this is was already expressed in the Bible: "In him we were also chosen, designated in accord with the purpose of the One who accomplishes all things according to intention of his will so that we might exist for the praise of his glory …." (Eph 1:11-12).

One of the truths that both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict have been eager to stress is the unity of faith and reason in attaining the goal of truth. We could illustrate this by the example of two hands joined in prayer. Although both the hands have developed on different arms, when they are put together, we see their unity is spite of their diverse origins. In a similar way good philosophy should lead to a vision of reality that is fully in harmony with the teaching of the Church. Faith which seeks understanding is thus a healthy stimulus to a philosopher sincerely seeking the truth and it also serves as a valuable point of reference in avoiding blind alleys in the on-going journey to towards a deeper understanding of the truth.

This is the reason why the Pope immediately turns his answer on the history of salvation to the discussion of philosophy. He draws our attention to the fact that since the time of Descartes, who is called the father of modern philosophy, there has been a profound change in a common vision of reality that remains till our own times. By turning away from the God of existence and turning inwards to his own personal thought, Descartes had opened a path towards "immanentism and subjectivism." In the period after this, the God of the deists replaced the God of being described by St. Thomas Aquinas as "Ipsum Esse subsistens": i.e., God is the subsistent "To Be" (Esse in Latin) that underlies all existent beings. This philosophical definition of God as the original "To Be" of all reality was a key doctrine of St. Thomas that distinguished him from the great philosophers that he integrated harmoniously into his vision of reality, especially Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine.

A recent philosopher, Heidegger, had noted that the "To Be" (Sein) that lies at the basis of reality has been ignored by philosophy since the early Greeks, but the Pope points out that it precisely this aspect of Esse (the verb "to be", not the noun) that lies at the basis of a correct philosophy as is seen in the case of St. Thomas. Thus, it is the "hand" of faith that finds its harmonious counterpart in the "hand" of reason in the vision of St. Thomas. The faith is found succinctly in Christ’s statement "Before Abraham came to be, I AM" (Jn 9:58). The Pharisees who heard this recognized that this "I Am" referred to the very name of God (Yahweh) which was based on the word "to be" in Hebrew. Jesus was claiming to be the God of existence, and so they wanted to stone him then and there.

The Pope observes that the God of the deists is the only God tolerated by the philosophical trends that followed Descartes. The God of the deists is not the God of existence. The Pope describes him as God "outside the world." This means a God who is not involved in the history of the world or individual people. He may be described as like a clockmaker who creates an ingenious clock that goes on to work all by itself with no involvement of the maker. Perhaps a better image is that of a chicken who lays an egg. Thereafter, the inner forces of nature lead to the production of the chick without any need for anything but a source of heat. This in simple words is immanentism – a universe and a humanity that develops all by itself without the involvement of God just like an egg develops without any need for a chicken. This runs totally against the Biblical view of God which sees God as a participant in the history of the world which is a history of salvation. The God of the deists is thus not the God of the Bible; he is a philosophical idol. He is the product of human imagination and deserves neither our praise, thanksgiving, or adoration. Appropriately the psalms say of such kinds of gods: "they have mouths but speak not; they have eyes bus see not; they have ears but hear not, nor is their breath in their mouths. Their makers shall be like them, everyone that trusts in them" (Ps 135: 16-18). However, since the god of the deists is a totally imaginary god, he lacks even the physical attributes of the idols the prophets condemned!

The participation of the Biblical God in the history of each individual is due to the fact that he is the "To Be" of every reality. Without him nothing can come into existence or remain in act. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums it up well in number 308 where it states "The truth that God is at work in all the actions of his creatures is inseparable from faith in God the Creator. God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes "For God is at work in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Phil 2:13). It is here that we see the importance of the Pope’s stress of St. Thomas’ description of God as "To Be" (Esse) rather them simple Being (Ens in Latin). Moreover, St. Thomas would go even further, for he insists that our knowledge of God, though true, is always based on comparisons with his creatures and thus never reveals totally the mystery of God. Thus, we can refer to God as the Supreme Being, but always with the understanding that he is beyond any other being we have ever known. The deist concept of God, on the other hand, is quite simply a philosophical idol and not the real God at all. Such a deity, if he were not in fact logically absurd, could neither know nor care about the universe we live in just like the idols condemned by the ancient prophets.

In the previous section, I spoke of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I should mention that this catechism is not just an ordinary catechism. In the decades after the second Vatican council, it became evident that there was genuine confusion as to what the fundamental teachings of the Church were on certain issues. Finally, Pope John Paul and the future Pope Benedict came out with this catechism to clarify matters in an official way. Thus, in this catechism, they presented in an official and synthetic way the official position of the Catholic Church on the fundamental questions of theology. It is worth noting also that two of the authors mentioned in this article are frequently quoted in the new catechism: St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. The Catechism’s use of the technical terms "first cause" and "secondary cause" makes use of a Thomistic notion that shows how there are two levels of action in the action of each creature. On the one hand, the fundamental existence of each act depends on God the "To Be" of all our actions. On the other hand as the Catechism states in 306, God makes use of the "creatures’ cooperation." Thus a free human is capable of failing to cooperate completely with God’s grace and remain trapped in moral error and evil due to his own lack of openness to the saving presence of God – the God of Salvation who lies at the basis of salvation history.

The problem of evil has throughout history scandalized believers, e.g. Psalm 37 "Be not vexed at the successful path of the man who does malicious deeds ... For evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord shall possess the land" (Ps 37:7,9). Likewise the Catholic Catechism states in numbers 312 and 313: "In time, we can discover that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequence of an evil … ‘We know that in everything God works for good for those who love him’ (Rom 8:28)." The ultimate victory of good over evil is the eschatological dimension of our faith.

One might reasonably ask how is it possible that with Descartes the Pope sees philosophy as taking a "wrong turn" so to speak, abandoning the study of esse (To be) and getting bogged down in an epistemological swamp of idealism (a kind of philosophical fantasy land) and subjectivism and skepticism -- a trend which the Pope sees as going on in our present day. It is not a coincidence that Descartes appears just after the Protestants had effectively opened a cultural and linguistic gap in Christianity that has never really been healed. Once the kings and princes of northern Europe had opted for Protestantism, the growing tendency to nationalism and linguistic isolation in Europe took a leap forward.

As long as Western Europe was Catholic, Latin had a major role in facilitating dialogue, especially in the areas of theology and philosophy. That helps to explain why the importance of the valuable insights that St. Thomas had on the fundamental Esse (To be) of everything were eventually ignored and unknown among the northern Europeans. In fact, now they were condemned to a philosophy cut off from its history or compelled to return to the sources of philosophy in the ancient Greek writers. Thus they took up philosophy in a way that forced them to deal anew with problems which Catholic philosophers had been dealing with for centuries in the Latin language. However, there was yet another obstacle to continuity and dialogue, Catholic philosophy tended to be integrated as part of mainly theological works (which was the main interest of the great Catholic thinkers). Thus, it is understandable that Protestant thinkers would have neither the time, patience, interest, or linguistic ability to truly examine what work had already been done and thus see what progress had been made. Protestants were perhaps understandably not interested in what the Catholics had been saying in what seemed to them to be purely Catholic theology. A simple example of this is Hegel’s history of philosophy. It is a rather substantial work, but he dismisses St. Thomas in less than a page. This is indicative of Hegel’s ignorance rather than an indication of the value of St. Thomas as the Pope has indicated in his book.

The conclusion might be: you can listen to the challengers, and you can challenge the challengers, but if they choose not to pay attention, your challenge is a witnessing that falls on deaf ears. In short, authentic dialogue must be a two way street or it fails to be effective.