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The Train of Faith Rides on the Rails of Reason
A Brief Discourse on the Family
by Joseph O’Donnell
Some years ago when I was engaged in a catechetical program, one of my required courses was metaphysics, the study of “being as being” or, to put it simply, the study of reality.
As students, my classmates and I had to acquaint ourselves with the metaphysician’s vocabulary, and before long, terms such as “act and potency,” “matter and form,” and “essence and existence” were showing up in our notes. We soon learned, too, that metaphysics involved a degree of abstract thought that was new to most of us. Somehow we were to go beyond the sensible images we normally conjured up in our imaginations and deal instead with principles common to things that exist, and just because they exist. We were in search of the ultimate causes of things and, these were to be found in what was for us the uncharted realm “beyond physics.” Knowledge may begin in the senses, but it does not end there. What may be unimaginable is not necessarily inconceivable, as the perspicacious Frank Sheed once observed.
But, surprisingly, despite the unfamiliar nomenclature and the need to think intellectually as opposed to imaginatively, metaphysics is akin to the natural, spontaneous knowledge we call common sense. And common sense, apart from any technical connotation the philosophers may give it, is part of the mental makeup of ordinary people who may not be able to articulate precisely the metaphysical principles at work in their thinking. One could say, then, that in a certain sense we all come equipped to practice metaphysics in a fundamental, informal way.
It was heartening to hear that in our day-to-day-life we could be metaphysically sound without being philosophically learned. Our teacher wanted us to be familiar with the language and mental manipulations of the metaphysician, but he knew that we could not survive for long in a totally image-less world, so, being a benign teacher as well as a learned one, he would occasionally use metaphors — graphic ones — to make a point.
One of those metaphors was, “The train of faith rides on the rails of reason.” He used this metaphor to make the case for our actively engaging the human power of reason in our catechetical mission, pointing out that we should think like metaphysicians before we start to teach like theologians. In other words, there are certain natural truths about man and the world available to us on a rational level that put us in touch with reality, and if we persevere in this use of reason — employing mainly the principle of causation — we will be led eventually to a reality “that everyone calls ‘God’,” to borrow an expression from the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 34). His point was that we needed a basic grasp of these natural truths to gain an authentic understanding of the supernatural truths of faith, for it is these rationally accessible truths that “predispose [us] to faith and help [us] see that faith is not opposed to reason” (CCC 35). We call these, quite properly, the “preambles of faith” — man plugging away, using only his power of reason to get to the bottom of things, including man himself, priming himself, as it were, for the richer, fuller truths of revelation.
Pope John Paul II underscores the importance of this preliminary role of reason in our life of faith when he tells us that, “God would not have been able to reveal himself to the human race if [the human race] were not already capable of knowing something true about God.”1
In a similar vein, philosophy professor Ralph McInerny reminds us that “Particular Church doctrines can only be adequately understood if we grasp the underlying truths about man and the world [that those doctrines] presuppose.”2 The Church has a rational or metaphysical view of man and the world that is consonant with her theological doctrine about man and the world, and if we want to acquire a good understanding of the latter, we should have a good grasp of the former.
Now keeping in mind this explanation of the train-of-faith/rails-of-reason metaphor, let us see if it has some application to the difficulties that beset the family today.
Social scientist Charles Murray, in a provocative article a few years ago, said that illegitimacy, the begetting of children out of wedlock, “is the single most important social problem of our time — more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else.”3
While Mr. Murray’s views may not accord with those of the Church in some other matters, one would be hard pressed to find a problem or situation more damaging to healthy family life than the one he cites. Putting aside for the moment the religious or sacramental character of marriage and its grace-giving capacity, there are natural, almost self-evident truths about the union of man and woman that we ignore at our own peril. I am not talking just about the complementarity of the sexes and the propagation of the species (these truths, obviously, have not gone undiscovered by those having children out of wedlock). I am speaking also about the nurturing and protective benefits come to children begotten in marriage and the stability that families formed in marriage (and persevering in their marriage responsibilities) give to the larger human body we call society. To shun marriage and its commitments is to shun the human obligations that marriage by its very nature entails. This can be asserted not just as a matter of Church doctrine or sacramental theology, but as a matter of good common sense.
In the light of all this, one can only ask why this time-honored, child-favoring institution we call marriage has been abandoned by so many. The problem is metaphysical: our understanding of the human person and the family has become clouded and detached from reality. A disturbingly large part of our population, it seems, has failed to grasp the fundamental natural truths about man that keep us sane and our families healthy.
The Pope himself has made this very point:
[W]ith regard to his deepest metaphysical dimensions, contemporary man remains to a great extent a being unknown to himself. Consequently the family too remains an unknown reality.
But somehow we fail to deal with this root cause of illegitimacy. Our remedies instead are aimed largely at its surface manifestations, and range from suggestions for better sex education for our young people to imposing stiffer penalties on deadbeat dads. Since social policies—whether we recognize it or not — are formulated on the policy-maker’s view of man, it appears that many of our policy-makers are, shame to tell, metaphysically impaired. Good, effective social policy cannot be built on a skewed view of reality.
With our policy-makers standing on metaphysically shaky ground and with counter-balancing influences from other quarters (education and the media in particular) sadly lacking, many in the general population have come to think that “doing what comes naturally” (as comically described in the Irving Berlin tune of that name) is the only natural truth worth reckoning with.
Now having made that broad indictment, let me suggest several things that I think are essential to a happy stable family life.
“Know thyself” is the sage advice that comes to us from antiquity and it is the logical starting point for us if, as the Pope tells us, man is a being “unknown to himself.”
Admittedly, no child upon reaching the age of reason is going to suddenly realize the nature of his special human gifts (intellect and will) and their proper use (the natural law), or, indeed, the contingency of the things of this world (we all die). But, parents can and should find ways to make these natural truths known to their children, so that they know not only who they are (Jimmy Jones, Sally Smith, etc. ) but what they are in the natural order: rational, bodily beings who stand atop all other earthly creatures — the clever animations of our film makers notwithstanding!
It is, I believe, our failure to put first intellectual block in place that has caused so many social problems — our failure to see the distinctiveness of man in the natural order and the reasonableness — indeed, the necessity — of the existence of God. Aristotle reminds us that “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold”5 — reason enough to make a good start in formulating social policy.
We must be careful — and teach our children to be careful — not to accept unwittingly those cultural experiments (e.g., begetting children out of wedlock) that are at odds with a rational (and the Church’s) understanding of nature and reality. It is this rational or, if you will, this metaphysical orientation to life that will serve as the support for the greater truths that come to us from revelation. As one philosopher wisely put it:
To know what is and to adjust one’s life to that knowledge is the highest natural wisdom of man, a wisdom that inevitably points the way to the source of all truth, both natural and revealed. (Author’s emphases.)6
And it is revealed truth that gives us the whole truth about man. We cannot know man as thoroughly as we should by simply pondering natural truths. We would not know, for instance, how great is God’s love for us were it not for His Divine Revelation. And Revelation carries with it an intellectual bonus. God knows that few of us will, on our own initiative, exercise our intellectual gifts to the degree necessary to arrive at those natural truths we need to know about ourselves and the world. And so God in His love for us has revealed not only the great mysteries and supernatural truths of faith, but the essential philosophical truths that undergird our faith. Christians, therefore, “by simply believing what God had said [found] themselves possessed of all that which they needed in the way of philosophical truth.”7
Religion, then, far from being an escape from reality, embraces reality and develops it. We are instructed by our religious leaders to “look at things realistically;” they tell us that “religion always has a deeply realistic viewpoint, even if some people try to convince [us] that “religious’ means ‘idealistic’ in an imprecise sense of that word.”8
But we know that today few share our perspective. The general culture has become antagonistic to the rational and especially the religious truths of man and the family. Cardinal Keeler in a recent speech took note of this: “Sadly, we find ourselves in a society stripped of religious conviction, religious symbols, and religiously grounded moral norms.” 9
While the Catholic family must remain cognizant of this, it can take heart from the words of Pope John Paul II: “[M]an does not become the prisoner of any culture, but asserts his personal dignity by living in accordance with the profound truth of his being.”10 We may be surrounded by a culture that is largely incompatible with our view of life and especially of family life, but we need not and should not acquiesce in it. We can stand above such a culture and even counter its influence by living in accordance with the “profound truth of [our] being,” as the Pope suggests. And the profound truth of our being, as we know from reason and revelation, is that we are children of God (1 Jn 1), that we are made in His image, endowed with intellect and will, powers that are directed to truth and goodness. We must remind ourselves of this regularly and impress it on our children. We have a singular identity among all God’s earthly creatures, and our troubles often stem from a failure to remember what we are.
Finally, we must clothe all that we do in love. Love is the essential Christian virtue, “the one thing needful,” as Cardinal Newman tells us. Of the “three theological virtues, faith and hope are for this world and are inoperative once we die, but love is for now and forever. As children of God, we cannot live pleasingly in the sight of our Heavenly Father without love. Religion in its simplest terms is love of God and neighbor. We are religious persons, not according to how much we know or even how well we order our lives, but on how much we love.
And before all else, we must cultivate a deep strong love of God. Scripture tells us, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your might”(Deut 6:5). This is no easy task. Too often, as Newman reminds us, our words outrun our hearts; we are given to much profession but to little real love. To change this, Newman suggests that we contemplate often the crucified Savior and, in a spirit of personal mortification, that we bear our own crosses uncomplainingly. A genuine love of God is more likely to be engendered if it is preceded by mortification.11
We are living in troubling times, but no times are so bad that a good man cannot live in them, St. Thomas More once said. The evils we face arise, according to one observer, “from a neglect of metaphysics in the world of thought and from a neglect of the interior life in the practice of religion.”12 These are the very points this brief discourse tries to make. We need to think clearly and realistically about man and life; we need to realize that revealed truth rests comfortably on natural truths; we need to do good by loving God and our fellow man. These are the necessary, age-old remedies for the ever recurring troubles that beset us as individuals and families.
Joseph O’Donnell teaches religion at The Heights School in Potomac, Maryland.
End Notes
1 Pope John Paul II, God, Father and Creator: A Catechesis on the Creed
(Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 1996), 41.
2 Ralph McInerny, “Persons and Things,” Catholic Dossier,
January/February 1997, 2.
3 Charles Murray, “The Coming White Underclass,” Wall Street
Journal, October 29, 1993.
4 Letter to Families from John Paul II (Boston: St. Paul Books &
Media, 1994), 76.
5 The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed., Richard McKeon (New York: Random
House, 1941), 404.
6 Robert J. Kreyche, First Philosophy: An Introductory Text in
Metaphysics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959), 312.
7 Etienne Gilson, “What is Christian Philosophy” in A Gilson
Reader, ed., Anton C. Pegis (Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1957), 179.
8 Karol Wojtyla, The Way to Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1982), 59.
9 Address by Cardinal William Keeler, Basilica of Santa Maria
Trastevere, Rome, June 30, 1997, in Origins, July 17, 1997.
10 Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, n. 53.
11 John Cardinal Henry Newman, “Love, the One Thing Needful,”
in Newman at St. Mary’s, ed., Lawence F. Barmann, S.J. (Westminster, MD: The Newnan
Press, 1962), 69-79.
12 M. Eugene Boylan, This Tremendous Lover (Westminster, MD: Christian
Classics, 1989), X.