Wither Religiously Affiliated Law Schools: Thomas as a Hopeful Guide

Musing over Mark’s “struggles” with “deep skepticism” and faculty discomfort with the project to “make Catholic identity mean something” - I realized that I take great comfort from an appreciation of just how challenging this project is - so I'm not surprised or discouraged when it meets resistance or when it becomes evident that it will take time.

Looking into a distant mirror:  in his wonderful book, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, Josef Pieper sets out Thomas Aquinas’s cultural feat against the backdrop of the Aristotilean “urge to investigate, on the plane of pure natural philosophy, the reality that lay before men’s eyes.” (30)  By the time Thomas began teaching at the University of Paris, the medieval world was deeply suspicious of any premature harmonization of these two worlds; and one could already detect the fault lines of the threatened divide between what men “knew” and what they “believed.” (120)  To use Pieper’s image, to draw together the ends of Odysseus’ bow would require a “superhuman strength.”  (118-19)

As Pieper explained, Thomas’s challenge was not just to draw the ends together, but to do so in such a way that their “distinctiveness and irreducibility, their relative autonomy and their intrinsic justification, were seen and recognized.”  (120)  Further, the necessity of their union must be made apparent “not from the point of view of either of the two members of the union - neither simply from the point of view of faith nor simply from that of reason - but by going to a deeper root of both.”  (120) 

I see being at a school which cannot “start over” as a great blessing - both personally and intellectually.  The rigor and skepticism of colleagues can push us to new dimensions of openness, dialogue, and intellectual depth - toward a synthesis in which the deepest roots of both faith and reason are understood and appreciated. 

True, we may not have Thomas’s “superhuman” strength (or intellect!).  But here too - with extraordinary beauty, Pieper describes Thomas’s work in the silence of his “inner cloister,” with a heart “wholly untouched and untroubled,” able “to listen to something beyond [the din of his times], something entirely different, which was the vital thing for him.” (97) 

And when the resistance is hostile and the “culture wars” seem to paralyze hope for respectful and open conversation? Perhaps this is the moment to listen to “something beyond” the din, something - or someone - entirely different - someone who loved so deeply that he took on and identified with an experience of the darkest depths of doubt and skepticism: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  (Mk 15:34). 

Could this “method” - the capacity to fully enter into and go through the tunnel of doubt that our colleagues experience - with love and out of love - be the "vital" resource for the “struggle”?

Amy