RETHINKING THE NEED FOR CONVERSATION IN A GLOBAL AGE
IDEAS FROM SCOTUS, NEWMAN AND POPE JOHN PAUL II
ON HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
Edward J. Ondrako, OFMConv.
Newman Conference
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Mass.
June 2002
Outline
Introduction
Understanding Oneself: Sich Selbst Verstehen
Scotus: Thisness and Mutuality
Newman: Development and the Obedience of Faith
Newman: Public Opinion and Reason
Scotus, Newman: Tradition and Authority Pope John Paul II
Conclusion
Seven Points on Successful Conversation
Introduction
Ours is a global age, and age of human rights, and age of law suits. The rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer, while the process of globalization is here to stay. In the midst of the most distressing spiral of hatred, violence and terrorism, the Assisi Decalogue for Peace shines as a bright ray of hope for civil minded people to address common problems. Violence and terrorism are incompatible with the authentic spirit of religion, it says clearly. Growth in civility, nobility and humanness comes in proportion to how and why we affirm universal human rights, develop mutuality, and live by moral principles. The fact that the poor are becoming poorer is a sober reminder that poverty prevents persons from achieving their full human potential. Reasonable people can disagree on how to build a more civil, noble 'and humane world, but we be wiling to work at it. Successful conversation depends on not only understanding world history, but knowledge of cross-cultural and transnational values. For Christians, the Gospel is the root and motivation for the church's proclamation of justice and universal brotherhood.
My paper offers a view of "conversation" as a means towards coming to an understanding with another, that is, human understanding rather than theological understanding. There are commonalities in the writings of John Duns Scotus, John Henry Newman and Pope John Paul II that are worth exploring. I am learning what excellence, engagement with tradition and authority, and the place of Mary in their lives means. Authority is linked to tradition in the broadest sense. Both confront and invite a conversation with the past. Humanity can learn from the past without abandoning the present. Understanding comes when we let the wisdom of the past raise questions about the present. It is in this sense that I am positing an active interaction among the three.
A conversation is something in which a person gets engaged. One does not know beforehand what the outcome will be. This is not `subjectivism doubled' as Hans Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), once quipped, (Interview by C. Dutt, trans. R. Palmer, Yale U. Press, 2001, p.59), but an openness to new and better insights. Conversation about the aspirational Assisi Decalogue for Peace (Feb 24, 2002), for example, has a potentially transformative power towards "understanding" for the political and religious communities. Similarly as the aspirational Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 gave rise to new international protocols, Pope John Paul II, and the religious representatives who met in Assisi last January, 2002, gave sound principles for civic and religiously minded individuals to implement covenants, protocols, and community activities. The Assisi Decalogue is blunt: Humanity must chose between love or hatred.
Bl. John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), and Pope John Paul II, have chosen love and the power of love as an absolute truth. They are consummate defenders of history, of ethics, of the responsible and right use of intellect, freedom, and human understanding of how things ought to be. Such understanding requires freedom to be linked with moral truth. Hence, their life efforts at faith seeking understanding are implicitly comparative. By a few comparisons in their writings, I will show how they meet people in free, open and heartfelt "conversation" in search for truth, vis a vis taking standpoints. Taking a standpoint means, I mean that one is not able to find anything in common. A standpoint keeps one from expanding one's horizons. In other words, it was not a good conversation.
John Duns Scotus was born in Scotland in 1266, became a Franciscan, spent time at Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Paris, and Cologne where he died prematurely in 1308. His discovery of the absolute primacy of Christ and the difference between preservative and liberative redemption, contributed to the definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854.
John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801, became the University Chaplain at Oxford, a leader of the Tractarian Movement of reform, founded the Catholic University in Ireland during the 1850's and the Oratory with a school at Birmingham. Three years after his death, in 1893, at the University of Pennsylvania, was born the Newman Movement at American Colleges and Universities. Both Scotus and Newman exemplify the balance between a life of spiritual devotion and the art of reasoned discourse in the quest to come to a human way of understanding how God deals with humanity.
Fr. Karol Wojtyla, was born in Poland in 1920, and taught a doctoral seminar on philosophical ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin. The communist authorities approved this `harmless dreamer' as bishop, only to be in irreparable shock in 1978, when the prayerful intellectual assumed global authority. Former President Gorbachev attributes the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991 to his unrelenting insistence on human rights and higher values. His writings treat past traditions with respect, while recognizing their richness as foundations for new horizons.
Like Scotus and Newman, Pope John Paul II has a personalist norm as a key concept for "successful conversation," that is, nothing less than the encounter of two freedoms in love. Personalism fuels their love for truth and quest for human understanding.
The lives and thought of Scotus, the Franciscan, and Newman, the Englishman, are more symmetrical. The Galician born Fr. Wojtyla developed m a more dangerous era of totalitarianism, first Nazi and then Communist, with its characteristic double standard and ruthless. authoritarianism. The leaders arbitrarily severed links with the Catholic past that was seen as nonsense at best. In 1975, for example, after many nations in the Soviet block signed the Helsinki Accord, there was an appearance of freedom and respect for human rights, but only an appearance. Through it all, the young Fr. Wojtyla became preoccupied with the dignity of the person and future of civilization. He studied phenomenology, the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, et al. Like Scotus and Newman, Fr. Wojtyla set the primacy of personal devotion and the quest for understanding, human and theological, as the ne plus ultra for his life. As a Franciscan, I see this as nothing less than the desire for sanctification of the intellect, the bedrock for human understanding, and their efforts to rehabilitate tradition and authority.
Understanding Oneself: Sich Selbst Verstehen
.Martin Heidegger's (1889 -1976) major contribution to the philosophy of hermeneutics is that one must understanding oneself with one's prejudices and prejudgments as part of the process of understanding. While devoting his life to human understanding through conversation, his pupil, Gadamer, discovered the legitimacy to ones prejudices and prejudgments in the quest for understanding. Like Heidegger, Gadamer insists that understanding has to be applied to oneself. While reading Gadamer, I began to sense the interrelatedness of Scotus, Newman and Pope John Paul II. Their intense personal quest for truth seemed rooted in the broad concept of successful conversation. Conversation is at the very heart of hermeneutics. For Gadamer Bildung, is "the properly human way of developing one's natural'talents and capacities" (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2002 edition, xii). Bildung is conversation with history, with learning, with culture and with others. Bildung includes the idea of culture, much like the Greek paideia. In sum, the thought of Scotus, Newman and Pope John Paul II exemplifies rigorous study, not idle chatter or superficial analysis. They know that it is not sufficient just to hear one another, but to engage in such a way as to really listen. By such listening, Scotus, Newman and the Holy Father reach self-understanding.
For the past twenty-two years as a Newman Chaplain, my reading of the thought of the Slavic Pope, the Oxford controversialist, and the Franciscan who was "the rarest veined unraveller who most swayed the spirits of Gerard Manley Hopkins to peace" (Hopkins, Duns Scotus Oxford), have helped me to seek self-understanding and to contextualize authority and the Franciscan tradition in the Church. By jettisoning harmful prejudices and prejudgments, and grounding myself in my legitimate prejudices and prejudgments, about the thought of Scotus, Newman and Pope John Paul II, I found new horizons. In the process of understanding, these horizons have a mobility that Gadamer calls the "fusion of horizons."
Scotus: Thisness and Mutuality
When we are confronted by a question, we seek an answer.. We seek understanding. Gadamer teaches that "understanding is not something that takes place at the end of humanistic research about an object, it stands at the beginning and governs the whole process of questioning, step by step" (Dutt, p.50). Moreover, for him, "all understanding is interpretation and that understanding is inextricably bound up with language" (Ibid).
Scotus's Franciscan formation prepared him for scholarly reflection. Scotus learned a threefold mode of doing theology from St.Bonaventure. The first mode is symbolic or the focus on the creeds and sacraments. The second mode is proper with its focus on the use of reason under the influence of the light of faith. The third mode is contemplative or mystical consisting in the knowledge of God which accompanies infused contemplation in this life and is the preparation for the beatific vision in the next life. Scotus's axiom: potuit, decuit, ergo fecit, fits into the second mode, what Franciscans call the proper mode of theology, the use of reason under the influence of the light of faith. The gift of understanding from the Holy Spirit has an affinity here.
By its nature, reason seeks to grasp the intelligibility of any mystery, the potuit, vis a vis its fittingness for our sanctification the decuit, and prepare the way for a clearer definition of what God has done the fecit, (see P D Fehlner, Mary, Queenship Publications, S. Barbara, CA 1997, p. 202). In other words, the Franciscan tradition is that the theologian does not prove what God has done but shows the intelligibility (the potuit), and the fittingness for incorporation into the life of the Church (the decuit) of each mystery, that is, what what God has done (the fecit)and the Church defines. In short, his thinking on the absolute primacy of Christ and his distinction between the liberative and preservative redemption paved the way for the definition and theological interpretation of the Immaculate Conception. It took until 1854 for - the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the "fusion of horizons."
During his lifetime there were many theologians who disagreed with him on the Immaculate Conception. In 1303, Scotus joined eighty some Franciscans who remained loyal to Pope Boniface VIII while seventy other friars sided with King Philip the Fair of France over the issue of taxation. Scotus paid for his loyalty by being exiled. Such loyalty to the Holy See is in accord with-the example of St. Francis and reflects the subtle doctor's broader loyalty to truth.
By emphasizing the centrality of the freedom of God, that God could have created the universe any way he wanted, persons and all of creation, Scotus gives a. vision of reality centered on the value of each individual. God is not arbitrary and unpredictable. Rather every person is.a manifestation of divine love and creativity. Each thing in creation has value because it is willed by God.
Scotus' term is haecceitas (thisness). Haecceitas makes every person and every thing irreplaceable in God's creation. Haecceitas is the ineffable in everyy person and thing. Hence the desire to respect and to understand creation. This desire for truth is linked to the will's most noble and godlike inclination. It is not the will's affection for its own happiness (affectio commodi) but its affection for justice (affectio justitiae). This is Scotus's way of talking about the primacy of love, or respect for the rights of others, giving to creation its due, and living according to the moral law.
The concept of haeceitas helped Scotus to understand the reality of divine love within creation. By emphasizing the ineffable value of each contingent being, he glorified the perfect liberality of God, who created this haec out of an infinite number of possibilities. God is perfectly free with perfect rationality. His is a perfect redemption by a perfect Redeemer in as perfect a world as possible. In such a schema, Mary becomes the perfect redeemed, the perfect fruit of redemption.
In the quest for human understanding, Scotus stresses that individuals help each other to become all that they can be in an interrelated manner. Male and female have reproductive capacity only in and through each other. Humans possess descriptive properties that are largely complementary to each other. One does not lose one's individuality in sharing with any other person, but develops mutuality.
Mary Beth Ingham observes that: