Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Henry Newman, on Reason and Faith)

“[I]t is our great misfortune here, and our trial…that, where power of intellect is, there need not be virtue; and that where right, and goodness, and moral greatness are, there need not be talent. It was not so in the beginning; not that our nature is essentially different from what it was when first created; but that the Creator, upon its creation, raised it above itself by a supernatural grace, which blended together all its faculties, and made them conspire into one whole, and act in common towards one end; so that, had the race continued in that blessed state of privilege, there never would have been distance, rivalry, hostility between one faculty and another. It is otherwise now; so much the worse for us;—the grace is gone; the soul cannot hold together; it falls to pieces; its elements strive with each other. And as, when a kingdom has long been in a state of tumult, sedition, or rebellion, certain portions break off from the whole and from the central government, and set up for themselves; so is it with the soul of man.” —English Roman Catholic convert, theologian, educator, and memoirist St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training” (Sermon on the Feast of St. Monica, Aug. 27, 1856)

It was welcome news late last month when Pope Leo XIV named St. John Henry Newman, an honor bestowed through a person’s writings, teachings, and research that have influenced Catholic doctrine. Only 38 saints in the Church’s long history have received this designation, including St. Thomas Aquinas, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, Teresa of Avila, and Therese of Lisieux.

For a summary of how Newman “influenced the thought and magisterial teachings of the Church during and after his life,” please read this essay by Benedictine College theologian Matthew Muller.

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on Reason Vs. Love)

“Each day my reason tells me so;
But reason doesn't rule in love, you know.”—French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (1666)

The image accompanying this post, from a 2013 production of The Misanthrope at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre, features Erik Hellman as Alceste, Moliere’s title character, and Grace Gealey as Celimene, the coquette who distracts him from reason.

This will not be a Happy Valentine’s Day for Alceste!

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on Reason and Faith)

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?’ The young sceptic says, ‘I have a right to think for myself.’ But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, ‘I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all...’Man, by a blind instinct, knew that if once things were wildly questioned, reason could be questioned first. The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define the authority, even of inquisitors to terrify: these were all only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all—the authority of a man to think. We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it. For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne. In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind. They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved. And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.” — English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Orthodoxy (1908)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on Reason vs. Vengeance)

“Yet with my nobler reason 'gaitist my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
 In virtue than in vengeance.”— ‎English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Tempest (1610-1611)

The wisdom of maturity—Prospero’s as well as Shakespeare’s—is summed up in these lines. Too bad that far too many people in public life fail to realize or practice it.

Quote of the Day (Dean Acheson, on Thinking That ‘The Human Mind Could Be Moved by Facts and Reason’)

“I was a frustrated schoolteacher, persisting against overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the belief that the human mind could be moved by facts and reason."—American Secretary of State and Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirist Dean Acheson (1893-1971), Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969)

Quote of the Day (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, on Reason and Freedom as God-Given Gifts)

“O sublime generosity of God the Father! O highest and most wonderful felicity of man! To him it was granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills….When man came into life, the Father endowed him with all kinds of seeds and with the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow and bear fruit in him. If these seeds are vegetative, he will be like a plant; if they are sensitive, he will become like the beasts; if they are rational he will become like a heavenly creature; if intellectual, he will be an angel and a son of God. And if, content with the lot of no created being, his spirit, made one with God in the solitary darkness of the Father, which is above all things, will surpass all things.

“Who then will not wonder at this chameleon of ours, or who could not wonder more greatly at anything else?”— Italian Renaissance philosopher and scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), “The Dignity of Man,” 1486, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary M. McLaughlin (1953)

Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address of 1837 kicked off American intellectual thought, so “The Dignity of Man” (or, as I heard it more formally referred to in college, the “Oration on the Dignity of Man”) has generally been considered the manifesto of the Renaissance.

In Dorothy Dunnett’s seventh novel in her “House of Niccolo” historical fiction series, Caprice and Rondo, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is a correspondent of Callimachus, an Italian humanist poet exiled to Poland. But Pico could easily be a major character in his own right. 

He was gifted beyond the dreams of ordinary men, not just with the riches one might expect of the heir to the principality of Mirandola but also (as suggested by the accompanying portrait in from the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence) with good looks, a phenomenal memory, effortless command of Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, and a charisma that drew women and men. Altogether, he was a dazzler in the Platonic Academy of Florence founded by Cosimo de' Medici. Aspiring to soar with the angels, he could only be brought down by his own impetuosity and the jealousy of others.

By his early 20s, Pico had decided not just to issue his equivalent of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologica, boiled down to 900 theses, but to defend it against all comers. Like Aquinas’ systematic body of knowledge, it was never finished. And like the Summa, it attracted early on the baleful eye of censors who regarded some of its propositions as heretical.

Though he argued for human freedom, dignity and autonomy, Pico’s thought had none of the secular overtones associated with today’s brand of humanism. Reason and the intellect, because they are God-given, he believed, not only separate us from the beasts but, when fully and properly used, lift men to the level of angels. 

By seeking to reconcile traditional church teachings with newly available texts on the Kabbala and ancient Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle, Pico provoked clerical enemies in the Inquisition (as well as personal enemies outside it, when he tried to run away with the wife of a cousin of his protector, Lorenzo de’Medici). The last half-dozen years of his life were marked by papal censure (Innocent VIII), Pico’s flight from Rome, imprisonment in France, release, and a late reconciliation with new pontiff Alexander VI.

Pico’s death at age 31 left far more open questions than just the manner of his passing. (The rumor that he and friend Angelo Poliziano were poisoned at the instigation of Lorenzo’s son, Piero de’ Medici, was confirmed only a decade ago by scientists using biomolecular technology, scanning equipment, and DNA analysis.) 

Nobody knows how much more he would have contributed to world thought if he had had the chance. Even though he wrote comparatively little in his truncated life, that residue remains enduring and powerful, as noted by conservative political and cultural theorist Russell Kirk:

“If Things are to be thrust out of the saddle once more, and Man mounted (in Pico’s phrase) ‘to join battle as to the sound of a trumpet of war’ on behalf of man’s higher nature, then some of us must go barefoot through the world, like Pico, preaching the vegetative and sensual errors of our time.”

(This blog post was inspired by two teachers highly different in temperament but similar in their commitment to reason: Prof. Eugene Rice, who, over several decades in his Modern European History survey course at my college, recounted to me and thousands of other students the personality and importance of Pico; and Sister Margaret Bradley, a Knick-loving Sister of Charity in my high school who told me not only that there was such a thing as a “Christian humanist,” but also that it was a title to be worn with pride.)

Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on Reason and Faith)

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” —Englishman of letters (and Catholic convert) G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Orthodoxy (1908)

Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on ‘The Light of Reason’ and Politics)

“To be sure, the light of reason is placed by nature in every man, to guide him in his acts towards his end. Wherefore, if man were intended to live alone, as many animals do, he would require no other guide to his end. Each man would be a king unto himself, under God, the highest King, inasmuch as he would direct himself in his acts by the light of reason given him from on high. Yet it is natural for man, more than for any other animal, to be a social and political animal, to live in a group.”— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), De regnoad. Ad regem Cypri (“On Kingship, to the King of Cyprus”), translated by Gerald B. Phelan, revised by Ignatius Thomas Eschmann, O.P.

Medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas’ optimistic vision of reason-guided human beings who participate in society, including as citizens, is being challenged as perhaps at no other time in our nation’s history. A global recession and a new digital frontier in which falsehoods spread with lightning speed have produced a situation far closer to Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s classic 1799 etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. These trends have fostered a despair and disbelief in experts that have left many citizens to act each as “a king unto himself” and as all-too-credulous believers in strange figures who came out of nowhere to break all social and popular norms.

In her celebrated 1950 analysis, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt points to “the uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and [which] have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.” 

The last few decades have seen this country follow a scenario once restricted to Europe, as institutions in which Americans once fervently believed—e.g., government, churches, the police, the press—have increasingly—daily—been called into question.

Commentators have spoken of the great division in contemporary American society, but I fear even more the possibility of subdivisions within our country, of a populace so distrustful of their neighbors that they are unable to form even two parties, let alone one. That would leave us atomized, capable of being molded into Arendt’s “mass man” who fell prey to the twin forms of totalitarianism, Fascism and Communism, between the First and Second World Wars.

The Western world gave rise to Aristotle, Aquinas and Arendt, believers in the power of thought. But what happens if the West now drifts into the sleep of reason? The nationalism, prejudice and bigotry abroad in the last decade—highlighted in the white noise of Twitter and talk radio here in the U.S. in the last week—pose momentous challenges to the rational vision of natural law formulated by Aquinas. Here on the North American continent, these forces have already produced a country unrecognizable to many of us of a certain age: an America no longer brandishing the standard of freedom for the world, but instead increasingly intolerant of difference.

Quote of the Day (Michael P. Lynch, on the Crisis of Reason in the U.S.)

“Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values. Indeed, this is precisely the situation we seem to be headed toward in the United States.” —Michael P. Lynch, In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy (2012)