The Catholicity of Reason (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought | RRRCT)

by D. C. Schindler

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2013

Overview

In The Catholicity of Reason, D. C. Schindler compellingly argues for recovering a robust notion of reason and truth. Responding to modern rationalism and postmodern skepticism, Schindler explains the “grandeur of reason”—the recollection of which Benedict XVI has presented as a primary task of Christian engagement with the contemporary world.

Schindler deftly argues that many postmodern thinkers—religious and secular alike—have responded to the arrogance of earlier Western thought with relativistic humility, critiquing these kinds of claims to knowledge as presumptuous. However, Schindler believes that only a robust confidence in reason allows us to remain genuinely humble in light of God and the great mysteries of existence. Drawing from contemporary and classical theologians and philosophers alike, Schindler explores basic philosophical questions of truth, knowledge, and being. Schindler proposes a new model for thinking about the relationship between faith and reason, bringing forth a dramatic conception of human knowing that both strengthens our trust in reason, and opens our minds in faith.

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Key Features

• Explores foundational philosophical questions
• Draws on the thinking of philosophers from Aquinas to Heidegger
• Proposes a fresh model of relationship between faith and reason

Contents

• Reason as Catholic
• Surprised by Truth: The Drama of Reason in Fundamental Theology
• The Primacy of Beauty, the Centrality of Goodness, and the Ultimacy of Truth
• Does Love Trump Reason? Toward a Nonpossessive Concept of Knowledge
• The Iconoclasm of the Intellect in Early Modernity
• Historical Intelligibility: On Creation and Casuality
• Giving Cause to Wonder
• The Problem of the Problem of Ontotheology
• Discovering What Has Already Been Given: On a Recent Defense of Thomistic Natural Theology
• Philosophy and Theology

Top Highlights

“a recovery of ‘the whole breadth’ of reason is the only adequate response to the problems of modernity.” (Page x)

“Reason is essentially catholic—καθʼ ὅλον, ‘according to the whole’—in four senses: in terms of its principles, (1) it is defined by its relation to being as a whole, and (2) it involves the whole person in its specific operation; and in terms of its exercise, (3) it always grasps the (whole as) universal, on the one hand, and (4) the (whole as) concrete, composite being or individual thing in each particular act, on the other hand, even if it thematizes only one or the other in any given instance.” (Page 3)

“The soul is ordered to being; however, it does not relate to being simply as such, but rather always under a certain aspect, most fundamentally: as intelligible (truth, the object of intellect), and as appetible (goodness, the object of will).” (Page 90)

“It is this paradox that lies behind the analogical character of being, and why there is no ‘getting beyond’ the analogia entis. But even to call analogy ultimate is another instance of the same paradox: being is everything … and more.” (Page 4)

“Precisely because substance necessarily has an ‘all at once’ quality, it cannot as we said come into being incrementally” (Page 158)

Praise for the Print Edition

Ressourcement and modern Augustinian philosophical theology have been called on their apparent ‘fideism’: Schindler’s response is a resounding philosophical ‘Come at me, bro!’ The Catholicity of Reason is the most stimulating text in philosophy of religion to appear for many years. . . . It’s the must read book of 2013.

—Francesca Murphy, professor of theology, University of Notre Dame

D. C. Schindler celebrates and brilliantly defends the life that is reason, a life threatened by reason's claim to be autonomous and equally by reason’s claim to be limited. . . . Against the reduction of reason to its discursive operations characteristic of the Enlightenment, Schindler insists on the infinitely rich activity of reason in pursuit of the trinity of the irreducibly distinct but always interrelated objects of reason—truth, goodness, and beauty. . . . The only thing more important than the catholicity of reason by which it strives to encompass all truth, goodness, and beauty is the Catholicity of reason—the great gift of divine revelation, which never restricts reason nor distorts human nature but, on the contrary, makes reason ever more reasonable and the human person ever more human.

—Montague Brown, director, The Institute for Saint Anselm Studies, Saint Anselm College

Schindler goes a long way toward restoring the metaphysical scope of reason. . . . Much of the discussion in this exploration of the catholicity of both reason and being takes place at the hinge where philosophy and theology join hands. . . . Anyone interested in all such questions of catholicity and analogy both in reason and in being will find much to take into consideration here.

—Oliva Blanchette, professor, Boston College

Product Details

• Title: The Catholicity of Reason
• Author: D. C. Schindler
• Series: Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Publication Date: 2013
• Pages: 372

About D. C. Schindler

D.C. Schindler is associate professor of philosophy at Villanova University. His books include Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Truth and Goodness in the Republic.