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Wosbald
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Don't skip to Catholicism's answers: First teach youth to ask philosophical questions [Opinion]

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As the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once quipped, "nothing is more absurd than the answer to a question that is not asked."

It has become common practice for Catholic secondary school religion curricula in the United States to begin with the life of Christ before exploring the universal human needs and questions that he claims to be the answer to. Is it any wonder that so many young people leave the faith behind once their natural inquisitiveness starts to rear its head?

For this reason, and others such as mass secularization and the influx of non-Catholic students attending Catholic high schools, Catholic educators need to teach young people to ask philosophical questions before urging them to accept our faith as the answer.

[…]

n my own experience, I've noticed how much high school students are more immediately receptive in my philosophy classes than they are in my religion classes, where they tend to come in with a kind of protective shield. Students light up upon finding out that a philosopher from as far back as 2,500 years ago asked the same questions that they find themselves asking today.

It's often the case that students who take my philosophy elective before taking my required religion classes are much more interested in learning about theology than the others. In philosophy, the soil of reason is tilled to receive the seeds of faith more openly.

I've also observed that students who come from devout families that discourage asking questions about their religion are often disposed to abandoning their faith altogether. One very intelligent and inquisitive student, who was raised with strict Catholic parents who recently immigrated to New Jersey from Latin America, was discouraged from asking questions, in part to protect her from losing her cultural traditions and moral values. Little did they realize that stifling her questions would have the reverse effect, discouraging her from delving deeper into her faith and cultural heritage.

But after studying philosophy, this student — and many others like her — found she was able to formulate coherent and decisive questions that enabled her to enter more deeply into the reasoning behind certain beliefs and practices. More importantly, philosophy fosters in students a sharper awareness of the intrinsic needs and questions in their own hearts that most religions claim to respond to.

Philosophy has also helped my Muslim and Hindu students explore their own traditions, while also enabling them to better appreciate what they learn in Catholic theology classes.

Further, I've seen students who didn't grow up with any religious background start becoming curious about God after studying questions about metaphysics, ultimate truth and life's meaning.

From a classical point of view, philosophy explores "natural" human questions, while theology explores the "supernatural" response to those questions revealed to us through Christ and the sacramental life of the church. As Aquinas understood well, God's grace builds on human nature, and our development of supernatural virtues like faith, hope and charity depend on the natural virtues of prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude.

The Scholastic method of theology that Aquinas developed engaged directly with "virtuous pagan" philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, whose vigorous use of reason enabled them to intuit greater truths that would soon be revealed by God. One may here think of Plato's "prophecy" of the truly just man, "God's equal," who would inevitably be "scourged and crucified," or of Paul's sermon in the Areopagus in front of the altar to the unknown god.

As distinct from more pessimistic modes of Protestant theology, Catholic theology acknowledges that the gift of reason was not totally destroyed by the Fall, and thus is not exclusive to those who have encountered Christ. Engaging philosophically with those who may not come to the same conclusion that Jesus is the son of God — but who share the same questions about truth, ethics and meaning — enables us to broaden our own sense of reason and to further develop our conscience. Thus the reason seminarians study at least two years of philosophy before moving on to study theology.

Jesus himself prioritized engaging the reason of those he encountered and fostering questions in them before revealing who he was. Think of when he asked John and Andrew what they were looking for, rather than starting off by telling them that he is the one they should be looking for, and why he asked Peter who he says that Jesus is, before revealing who he is.

The church, says Pope Francis, "is called to form consciences, not to replace them."

The Pharisees, who may have had all the "right" answers, were the object of Jesus' condemnation due to their refusal to make use of their consciences. Their understanding of laws and doctrines were totally disconnected from the questions, needs and desires at the depths of their hearts, thus rendering their answers — as correct as they may have been — flat and meaningless.

Studying philosophy can also serve to deepen student's general curiosity and desire to learn for learning's sake, making their experiences in other classes more engaging and meaningful. And the tools it affords students in terms of using logic and critical reasoning are essential in our politically divided culture where arguments are more often than not fueled by emotions and "groupthink."

Leaders in the church talk about how to keep young people in the fold amid growing waves of secularism. Unfortunately, most of this talk turns quickly into evangelizational models that look more like marketing schemes that aim to obtain a desired "result," rather than doing the actual work of forming young people's consciences and walking with them as companions on the journey of faith. Teaching young people to think philosophically is more conducive to the latter approach to evangelization.

Other methods, like the ones used within many classical Catholic high schools, are also worth considering. Take the Chesterton Schools Network, which, starting from students' freshman year, integrates study of philosophy alongside theology, "braided together" with other humanities courses in an "integrated curriculum."

It shouldn't be of any shock to educators and clerics that teaching young people what to believe rather than teaching them how to think about life and to arrive at the conclusions themselves usually has the reverse of the intended effect. While it may require us to deviate from methods we've grown accustomed to, it's time to, as Francis says, "open wide the doors" to the ways philosophy can help young people understand their faith more deeply.


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Philosophy in the News

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Wosbald wrote: 07 Feb 2023, 08:31 +JMJ+

Don't skip to Catholicism's answers: First teach youth to ask philosophical questions [Opinion]

Other methods, like the ones used within many classical Catholic high schools, are also worth considering. Take the Chesterton Schools Network, which, starting from students' freshman year, integrates study of philosophy alongside theology, "braided together" with other humanities courses in an "integrated curriculum."
I see what you did there, Wozzie.
=================================================================

File this under "Noone Cares About":

This week, I am at a conference with the Chesterton Schools Network. We are establishing a Chesterton Academy in Madison, opening Fall 2024.
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Benedict XVI and Nietzsche: A pope’s unlikely dialogue with an atheist philosopher

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While strolling through the streets of Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche once spotted a horse being whipped. Inwardly moved, he flung his arms about the animal’s neck and wept bitterly.

It was Jan. 3, 1889. The rest of the month, he who once proclaimed the death of God sent postcards to friends and world leaders, signing them either as “Dionysus” or as “The Crucified,” and announcing through them the fulfillment of the kingdom of God in his own person. Both to the king of Italy and the Vatican secretary of state, he affirmed his intention to come to Rome and meet the pope. Before long, however, he had a complete medical collapse, lost lucidity and descended into silence. He spent the last decade of his life out of the public eye, first constrained to an asylum and then in the care of his mother and his sister.

Three years before voluntarily entering into his own 10-year retirement, Pope Benedict XVI visited the Shroud of Turin and recalled Nietzsche’s witness to the death of God. That proclamation, he underscored, belongs to the original Christian understanding of Holy Saturday and has become even more poignant for us after a century of gulags and genocides. Yet Benedict reminds us that, just as the Shroud is a kind of photographic negative of the crucified Christ, so the death of God is the negative of Christ’s resurrection. We who dwell increasingly in the spiritual landscape of Holy Saturday may yet hope for the joy of Easter morning.

One of the more remarkable things in a pontificate full of surprises is the fact that Benedict’s major writings involved a significant engagement with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. The late pope’s justly celebrated first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, and his best-seller Jesus of Nazareth confront Nietzsche’s antithetical claims regarding the Christian way of life.

Needless to say, Nietzsche is an unlikely conversation partner for a supreme pontiff because he [Nietzsche], more than most, realized fully the yawning abyss in the human spirit that opens when God is no longer the center of our existence, an abyss that someone or something must fill. For Nietzsche, only the few — those philosophers well favored by nature and by culture — are potent enough to insert themselves in that space and experience joy.

Such a high-profile dialogue with an entrenched atheist remains unparalleled in papal texts. Even the philosopher-pope St. John Paul II did not address Nietzsche, preferring instead to discuss thinkers such as René Descartes or Paul Ricoeur when the opportunity arose. (During his short papacy, however, Pope John Paul I did anticipate Benedict by mentioning Nietzsche in a Wednesday audience devoted to Christian hope.)

Benedict, the theologian-pope, finds in Nietzsche a privileged interlocutor, and the ensuing dialogue affords him the welcome opportunity to formulate clear and compelling answers to the crucial questions of our times. We who wonder how to dialogue effectively would do well to follow his example.

Unlikely interlocutors

In Deus Caritas Est (2005), Pope Benedict gets to the heart of love by first citing Nietzsche’s aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil concerning sexual love: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated — into a vice.” Nietzsche here expresses what the pope calls “a widely-held perception” that somehow Christianity destroys the very highest aspect of human existence in its insistence on the purity of love.

Yet Benedict says that even the Greeks were well aware of the temptation inherent in sexual love, a temptation already identified in the Old Testament, and this is a temptation to dominate and use another human being for passing pleasure. Christianity, we could say, did not poison but rather healed love so that it could become what it is meant to be: the highest affirmation of being, the expression of our profound freedom and a vehicle of divine blessing.

In his encyclical devoted to hope, Spe Salvi (2007), Pope Benedict turns to the other great modern critic of Christianity, Karl Marx. His materialism, argues Benedict, imprisons us in a frame of reference that naively excludes both our deepest aspirations for unconditional love and our propensity for radical evil. While there is no mention of Nietzsche, Benedict does elsewhere note his challenge on this front:
As Nietzsche said: ‘The great light has been extinguished, the sun has been put out’. … But the big problem is that were God not to exist and were he not also the Creator of my life, life would actually be a mere cog in evolution, nothing more; it would have no meaning in itself.
Absent a transcendent source of existence and of love, there is no hope of meaningful progress, and we remain bereft of what Spe Salvi calls “the great hope that sustains the whole of life.”

In Lumen Fidei (2013), Pope Francis offered as his first encyclical the last one drafted by Pope Benedict. Again, Nietzsche appears at the very outset to speak as the mouthpiece of “many of our contemporaries,” who are proud of modernity’s autonomous rationality and who regard faith no longer as an illuminating light but instead a kind of enveloping darkness.

The two popes write: “The young Nietzsche encouraged his sister Elisabeth to take risks, to tread ‘new paths … with all the uncertainty of one who must find his own way’, adding that ‘this is where humanity’s paths part: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek.’” The whole encyclical takes as its task rekindling the sense that faith reveals the breadth and depth of human existence and thereby restores to life a genuine spirit of inquiry and adventure: “Religious man is a wayfarer; he must be ready to let himself be led, to come out of himself and to find the God of perpetual surprises.”

Benedict defends the Christian form of life, constituted by love, hope, faith and the beatitudes, in the face of Nietzsche’s unsparing criticisms.

Dialogue and truth

In Deus Caritas Est, Benedict recalls how the materialist philosopher Pierre Gassendi would greet René Descartes by saying, “O Soul,” and Descartes would reply, “O Flesh.” Why did Pope Benedict find it worthwhile to converse with such a thinker as Friedrich Nietzsche? What comes of the exchange “O Crucified” and “O Dionysus”?

Aristotle writes that we should be grateful to those who express views other than our own, even if those views are superficial, because they prompt us to inquire into the truth in fresh ways and to articulate reasons in support of what we know to be true. The point of such a dialogue is in fact not necessarily to change the interlocutor’s mind but instead to bring to light the intelligibility of one’s own position for those who witness the exchange.

In the same way, Benedict welcomes Nietzsche’s criticisms because they afford the opportunity of making the truth of the matter more manifest. Their dialogue concerns not just Christianity but indeed the question of the vitality of contemporary rationality and life; nothing less than truth itself is at stake.

Dialogue or dia-logos, Benedict says in Caritas in Veritate (2009), is rooted in rational speech, or logos, thanks to which we can both apprehend and communicate the truth to one another: “Truth, by enabling men and women to let go of their subjective opinions and impressions, allows them to move beyond cultural and historical limitations and to come together in the assessment of the value and substance of things. Truth opens and unites our minds in the lógos of love: this is the Christian proclamation and testimony of charity.”

Nonetheless, Nietzsche says that Beyond Good and Evil is not so much directed against Christianity, which has lost its sway over the West, but instead against modernity, because he thinks it has led to a mediocre, life-denying way of being. For him, the modern state is in some ways a secularized version of Christianity that retains all of its problems without any of its charms. (For example, he contrasts the noble piety of the poor with the insolence of the bourgeoisie, for whom nothing is sacred.)

He says he offers “a critique of modernity, not excluding the modern sciences, modern arts, and even modern politics, along with pointers to a contrary type that is as little modern as possible — a noble, Yes-saying type.” Reason, for him, is nothing more than a utilitarian calculus that robs life of its grandeur, and even the concept of truth must yield to the most powerful perspectives. Rejecting rationality and embracing, exuberantly, the language of the heart, Nietzsche looks to Dionysus as his model.

Benedict, for his part, thinks modernity suffers principally from an insensitivity to truth, which Plato calls “misology” or hatred of logos, and he challenges modernity to regain its love of logos and of the truth that transfigures us. To this end, he calls for a self-critique of modernity, involving, in equal measure, a critique of modern reason and of modern religion.

In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict writes:
Secularism and fundamentalism exclude the possibility of fruitful dialogue and effective cooperation between reason and religious faith. Reason always stands in need of being purified by faith: this also holds true for political reason, which must not consider itself omnipotent. For its part, religion always needs to be purified by reason in order to show its authentically human face.
If modernity is defined by immanent rationality and irrational religion, Pope Benedict offers the post-modern synthesis of transcendent reason and reasonable religion. Nietzsche may have railed against modern rationality and thereby helped to usher in our period of hostility to reason, but Benedict offers us an alternative to both modern rationalism and contemporary irrationalism. In this way, his exemplar is the “Crucified One,” the logos made flesh, who unites in his own person both the mind and the heart.

The question of Dionysus or the Crucified is also the question concerning the very possibility of meaningful dialogue today. Nietzsche advocates abandoning modern reason and modern faith, while Benedict advocates expanding and purifying modern reason and modern faith. Can contemporary reason become self-critical in a healthy manner in order to regain the possibility of achieving truth concerning ultimate questions? Can we learn again how to dialogue about the things that really matter?

Touched by God

[…]

Who among us is not nostalgic for joy? Our world has lost its faith and hope in love, and reason, anemic reason, seems unable to help. Can joy come to us through Nietzsche’s Dionysus and his rejection of instrumentalized reason? Or can joy come to us through Benedict’s Crucified Christ and his revitalized reason? That is the question put to those of us who witness the dialogue between these two German thinkers, one a philosopher and the other a pope. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is the pope who puts more faith in reason.


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