A first characteristic of philosophy if it is to serve humankind also by helping with the religious understanding of human dignity and destiny, is that it must be authentically philosophical. It cannot be a slave to theology, religion or anything else.

Classically, it has been honored to bear the term "ancilla theologiae". The term, of course, goes back to the words of Mary upon hearing the annunciation that she was to be the mother of Jesus. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord (Ecce ancilla domini), be it done unto me according to your word" (Lk 1, 38). These words are later echoed in the Qu`ran in detail in 3, 37-47 and in summary form in 4, 171. "The Christ Jesus, son of Mary, was merely God’s messenger and His Word which He cast into Mary, and a Spirit proceeding from Him!" For this reason, Mary and Christ were said to be the only ones to be preserved from evil.

The words, "Ecce ancilla Domini" are those of the prayer recited three times daily in the Catholic tradition, which in English is called "the angelus". Here Mary speaks for all humanity in inviting the work of the Spirit in human history and hence making it not only something that happens to us, but something we welcome as conscious, free and responsible persons. They contradict only the modern atheistic attitude by which God is excluded and humanity would save itself, that is, the modern idolatry in which one makes oneself to be God. For philosophy to be called the handmaid (ancilla) of theology is then by no means to reduce it, to enslave it or to destroy its authenticity; that would be true only in the secularist Promethean presupposition of absolute self-sufficient and revolt. On the contrary, it elevates philosophy to the key, even predominant, position it has held in the Catholic intellectual tradition as the supreme human outreach to participate in the work of human salvation.

Philosophy must be able to establish its own premises and carry them through to their own conclusion. This is found at two levels in Christian philosophy, both of which go beyond the occasionalism we saw in al-Ghazali. The earlier Platonic tradition of Augustine and others held a mediate position between the Greeks and the achievements of the High Middle Ages. For personal responsibility and immortality it was necessary to move from the Greek position of dependence upon a separately existing agent intellect and to recognize the presence of this capability in the human person as its soul. Yet in this medieval neo-Platonic position there were a number of souls according to the different levels of life, e.g., vegetative and rational. Further, God needed to place "seeds" in the person as special possibilities for specific future growth. He needed as well to illumine the mind by special supplemental illumination as it carried out the essential stages of conceptualization.

For Thomas this still was not adequate. As existence makes a being to be, one being could actuate but one existence. Further, by following rigorously the implication of the relation of esse or existence to essence, he could see that one esse could have but one essence, which was the capacity or potency for existence. In turn, one essence or nature could have only one specifying principle, that is only one form or soul, for otherwise the being would be of one kind by one form and would not be of that kind by reason of a different second form, which would violate the principle of contradiction. Hence, there can be but one form, one essence and one existence in a being. For the human person with both physical and spiritual capabilities this meant that the one esse, the one essence or nature, and the one form of the human person had to be inherently capable of the full range of human activities. Human nature then is not a combination of two levels of reality but a simple, integrated capability for actions all of which are properly human.

This entailed the proper autonomy of the human person. That is, once constituted as a being one is capable of the full range of actions in accord with the one distinctively human essence or nature, including those of a spiritual character. Indeed, spiritual acts of knowledge and freedom are acts properly of the human person. They are acts not of an angel or intellect above the human or even of a second form within the person, but of the one human person living according to a distinct human nature in time and capable of acting accordingly. Conversely the physical acts of the human person are fully human with not only animal but human dignity. Thus the esse and essence of the human person are inherently capable of the full range of human activities.

In this light the human intellect and will, with their corresponding philosophical capabilities, enable the human person to live in time as a human image of the divine. This is the true essence of religion. It is not compromised by philosophy following its proper path and arguing according to its own rules and logic; indeed this is essential.

The Encyclical suggests a further important implication, namely, holding rigorously to reasoning that is available to all who share human nature is necessary in order to arrive at insights which are universal in the sense of being available to all. This is especially important for the intensifying interchange and cooperation between the peoples of the world today. The importance of this promises to increase for the future as we proceed beyond the age of scientism and begin to recapture our cultures and to explore them for the values needed in nation building and for global society.

However, as anything humans can do they can do badly, we find to our dismay that cultural identities wrapped in ethnic identities can be manipulated politically into conflicts between peoples and attacks upon minorities. As we move toward the future and an intensification of global interaction, this threatens cumulatively ever larger conflicts in the direction of S. Huntington’s conflict between entire civilizations. This generates the imperative of developing ways of reasoning and insight available equally to all, and which at the same time recognizes the native ability of humans to develop in a unique manner their ability to transcend the self and reach out to others. This, in turn, allows for, and capitalizes upon, cultural diversity within overarching social unities.

It is to this that the Encyclical refers in saying:

(75) The demand for a valid autonomy of thought should be respected even when theological discourse makes use of philosophical concepts and arguments. Indeed, to argue according to rigorous rational criteria is to guarantee that the results attained are universally valid. This also confirms the principle that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it: the assent of faith, engaging the intellect and will, does not destroy but perfects the free will of each believer who deep within welcomes what has been revealed. (Fides et Ratio)

 

Secondly, in order to respond to the present crisis philosophy must be sapiential in character; it must be wisdom. It must not only focus analytically upon one or another particular dimension of reality, but take account of all of creation and relate all of it synthetically in the Creator:

(81) To be consonant with the word of God, philosophy needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life. This first requirement is in fact most helpful in stimulating philosophy to conform to its proper nature. In doing so, it will be not only the decisive critical factor which determines the foundations and limits of the different fields of scientific learning, but will also take its place as the ultimate framework of the unity of human knowledge and action, leading them to converge towards a final goal and meaning. This sapiential dimension is all the more necessary today, because the immense expansion of humanity’s technical capability demands a renewed and sharpened sense of ultimate values. If this technology is not ordered to something greater than a merely utilitarian end, then it could soon prove inhuman and even become a potential destroyer of the human race.

The word of God reveals the final destiny of men and women and provides a unifying explanation of all that they do in the world. This is why it invites philosophy to engage in the search for the natural foundation of this meaning, which corresponds to the religious impulse innate in every person. A philosophy denying the possibility of an ultimate and overarching meaning would be not only ill-adapted to its task, but false. (Fides et Ratio)

 

Hence it is not sufficient to restrict philosophy to any one of its dimensions, such as the formal, the functional or utilitarian, or to a phenomenology of human consciousness:

(82) Yet this sapiential function could not be performed by a philosophy which was not itself a true and authentic knowledge, addressed, that is, not only to particular and subordinate aspects of reality — functional, formal and utilitarian — but to its total and definitive truth, to the very being of the object which is known. This prompts a second requirement: that philosophy verify the human capacity to know the truth, to come to a knowledge which can reach objective truth by means of that adaequatio rei et intellectus to which the Scholastic Doctors refer. This requirement, proper to faith, was explicitly reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council: "Intelligence is not confined to observable data alone. It can with genuine certitude attain to reality itself as knowable, though in consequence of sin that certitude is partially obscured and weakened."

 

A radically phenomenalist or relativist philosophy would be ill-adapted to help in the deeper exploration of the riches found in the word of God. Sacred Scripture always assumes that the individual, even if guilty of duplicity and mendacity, can know and grasp the clear and simple truth. The Bible, and the New Testament in particular, contains texts and statements which have a genuinely ontological content. The inspired authors intended to formulate true statements, capable, that is, of expressing objective reality. It cannot be said that the Catholic tradition erred when it took certain texts of Saint John and Saint Paul to be statements about the very being of Christ. In seeking to understand and explain these statements, theology needs therefore the contribution of a philosophy which does not disavow the possibility of a knowledge which is objectively true, even if not perfect. This applies equally to the judgements of moral conscience, which Sacred Scripture considers capable of being objectively true. (Fides et Ratio)

 

Beyond this, philosophy must be knowledge of being as such and of Being Itself. This must be open to the intellect, i.e., true in the sense of a correspondence of being and intellect: "adequatio rei et intellectus". And philosophy, on its part, must develop by the intellect comprehensible ontological, causal and communicative structures to enable the human mind to respond to this intelligibility or truth of being.

Religion is about the relation of all to God as source and goal. Hence in knowing God as one, true and good we know also something about all things, namely, that their reality reflects that unity, truth and goodness. This is perhaps the most dramatic of the shifts needed in order to escape our present dilemma. In modern times, which placed the emphasis upon human power and control, we focused upon material objects which correspond to our lowest powers and are most completely under our domination. But in making our knowledge of these the paradigm of all human knowledge we have subjected ourselves thereto by modelling our powers of human relationships on the violent collisions of the blind atomic world. We can see now that this can only produce a violent society. We need to shift beyond this to the sapiential modes of knowledge and hence to the highest — not the lowest — of human referents. We need to appreciate that the true character of creation is to be found not in the violence of its lowest realization, but in the wisdom and love of its source and goal.

Further, we need to be concerned, in the words of St. Thomas, not just with what people think, but with the way things are (De coelo 1, 22):

(83) The two requirements already stipulated imply a third: the need for a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range, capable, that is, of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute, ultimate and foundational in its search for truth. This requirement is implicit in sapiential and analytical knowledge alike; and in particular it is a requirement for knowing the moral good, which has its ultimate foundation in the Supreme Good, God himself. Here I do not mean to speak of metaphysics in the sense of a specific school or a particular historical current of thought. I want only to state that reality and truth do transcend the factual and the empirical, and to vindicate the human being’s capacity to know this transcendent and metaphysical dimension in a way that is true and certain, albeit imperfect and analogical. In this sense, metaphysics should not be seen as an alternative to anthropology, since it is metaphysics which makes it possible to ground the concept of personal dignity in virtue of their spiritual nature. In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.

 

Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God. We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as necessary as it is urgent. We cannot stop short at experience alone; even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises. Therefore, a philosophy which shuns metaphysics would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of Revelation.

 

The word of God refers constantly to things which transcend human experience and even human thought; but this "mystery" could not be revealed, nor could theology render it in some way intelligible, were human knowledge limited strictly to the world of sense experience. Metaphysics thus plays an essential role of mediation in theological research. A theology without a metaphysical horizon could not move beyond an analysis of religious experience, nor would it allow the intellectus fidei to give a coherent account of the universal and transcendent value of revealed truth. (Fides et Ratio)

 

Objectivity is the way the object or thing is known in itself independently of the subject or knower and hence of the subjectivity or consciousness which is proper to the knower. This insistence upon philosophical objectivity stands out when set in the context of the development of the philosophy of John Paul II. Poland in the 1960s and 70s was subjected to the invasive force of an alien materialist ideology which presented itself as a thoroughgoing, objectively scientific view of history. In that context it was particularly important to salvage the subjective dimension of the human person with its self-consciousness and freedom.

Here, in Fides et Ratio, written in response to the skeptical, post-modern discouragement with the philosophical abilities of human consciousness, John Paul tends more to reaffirm the competencies of reason for objective metaphysical understanding. At the same time he points to the importance of the subjective context provided by belief for the enrichment of human consciousness and thence of objective reason.

1. David de Leonardis, Ethical Implications of Unity and the Divine in Nicholas of Cusa. (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1998).

2. Review of Metaphysics, 33 (1979/1980), 273-308.

3. Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 53 (1979), 3-4.