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Faith, Science and the Human Person
Rev. Dr Andrew Pinsent
Research Director
Ian Ramsey Centre, Faculty of Theology and Religion
University of Oxford
March 24, 2016
Faith, Science and the Human Person

DISTINCTIONS: God, philosophy, religion and faith

COMPATIBILITY: Can one be a person of faith and of science?

VALUE: Does faith help us understand persons and the world?

ACTIONS: How can we help faith ‘do’ what it is meant to do?
Contents
3/24/2016
Page 2
DISTINCTIONS:
GOD, PHILOSOPHY,
RELIGION, FAITH
Distinctions:
God, philosophy,
religion and faith
3/24/2016
Page 3
God and philosophy

Belief that there is a God is not unique to those who are
‘religious,’ cf. philosophical arguments of Plato, Aristotle,
Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Newton, Descartes, Kant etc.

This fact is obscured in contemporary culture due to the
influence of (new) atheists, who generally argue (and want to
believe) that theists are primitive, irrational and evil. So it is
helpful to be aware of intellectual inferences that there is a
God drawn simply from examining the world.

These lines of reasoning lead to the conclusion that there is a
God, but not to who (or what) God is, religious belief or faith.
Distinctions:
God, philosophy,
religion and faith
3/24/2016
Page 4
An example of the effects of prejudice on policy
Brian Iddon, the MP for Bolton South East, made
the following contribution to a debate on the
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill:
“… Throughout time, there has been a conflict
between religion and science. We should
remember Galileo, for example. It seems almost
impossible to believe today, but Harvey's
description of the circulation of the blood and the
heart's role in it met large objections in his day.”
The Palace of Westminster, where the
Embryology Bill was debated 12th May.
The building was designed by Sir Charles
Barry and Augustus Pugin. Pugin was a
Catholic convert whose Gothic style was
inspired by medieval Catholic architecture.
The very building where legislation now
contravenes natural law is a building
inspired by Catholic civilization.
… We hope that by taking the nuclei out of a skin
cell or other cell of sufferers of these diseases and
creating admixed human embryos, which the bill
deals with, scientists will be able to find out how
those diseases develop, with the ultimate goal of
stopping them developing at all in every individual
who might otherwise have acquired them.”
Manchester Evening News Blogs
Posted by David Ottewell on May 13, 2008 11:50 AM
Daily Telegraph
6th June 2006
Proofs for ‘God’s existence







Cosmological (first efficient cause/ mover)
Teleological (design/goals in nature)
From degree (proof of ‘maximal being’)
Ontological (‘being greater than which cannot be conceived’)
Anthropic (unlikelihood of our existence)
Moral (existence of objective morality)
Transcendental (non-sense without God)
Contrary to popular belief, many of these arguments are still ‘in play’ in contemporary
philosophy, that is, they have new formulations and influential advocates.
Attempts to invalidate these arguments usually try to show that God is not the only solution,
not that God is not a solution. Furthermore, any objections to any proof of God existence can,
at best, show that the proof is not valid rather than that God does not exist.
Distinctions:
God, philosophy,
religion and faith
3/24/2016
Page 7
Sometimes the structures found in nature witness to an supra-human order that
simply evokes belief in a divine mind and handiwork without any formal proof.
This is the view of St Augustine when he wrote, “All respond: ‘See, we are
beautiful’. Their beauty is a confession.” St Augustine, Sermon 241 (ccc. 32)
The Infinitely Complex
Mandelbrot Set,
revealed from 1978 by
means of computers
Why ‘God’ is practically unavoidable in the
search for wisdom: the ‘cause funnel’
Number of known
compounds:
Number of
elements:
Very large:
> 30 million
Many particular things which
are easy to know about
c. 118
Number of elementary particles
12 (+ force carriers; Higgs)
A small number of universal causes
that are hard to discover
Towards knowledge of ‘first’ causes. The more remote and
and powerful causes tend to be smaller in number, not links in an endless chain
Distinctions:
God, philosophy,
religion and faith
3/24/2016
Page 9
Why ‘God’ is practically unavoidable in the
search for wisdom: the ‘cause funnel’
Particular human actions
(waking up, washing, eating,
lunch with friends, going to
college etc.)
Flourishing of
body, society and
mind
Many particular things which
are easy to know about
Happiness
A small number of universal causes
that are hard to discover
Towards knowledge of ‘first’ causes. The more remote and
and powerful causes tend to be smaller in number, not links in an endless chain
Distinctions:
God, philosophy,
religion and faith
3/24/2016
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Why ‘God’ is practically unavoidable in the
search for wisdom: the ‘first cause’
Cosmological proofs infer a ‘First Cause,’ an
‘Uncaused Cause’ that causes everything else in
the cosmos: this conclusion is hard to avoid
without denying our ability to trust causes
remote from experience (cf. Hume), which also
undermines science. The real challenge is to
know what God is, not whether God is.
Atheism usually offers substitutes, i.e.
an alternative ‘god’ in all but name
Distinctions:
God, philosophy,
religion and faith
3/24/2016
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Aquinas’ ‘Second Way’: an example
of a ‘cosmological proof’
Some opponents of the
cosmological proof claim that the
causal chain could be circular, avoiding the need
to begin with a First Cause ...
... but closed systems of causes tend to decay,
like a clock running down, and a circle of causes
is not itself self-causing, so a further causal
agent is still required.
The North Korean national anthem
Millions of flowers on the earth tell us his love.
Blue waves of the ocean sing of his work.
He is the creator of happiness to grow the garden of Ju-che.
Long live, long live, General Kim Jong-Il !
An English translation of the second verse of the
(former) national anthem of North Korea
The Juche (‘joo-cheh’) Idea is the official state
ideology of North Korea and its political system.
The core principle of the Juche ideology since the
1970s has been that 'man is the master of
everything and decides everything'.
Religion and faith
Belief in God’s existence and religion overlap but are not
identical. Besides facts or inferences about the world, religion
typically involves worship, traditions, ritual and other elements.
 The conception of ‘God’ and the relationship with God vary
considerably, e.g. Islam (mainly third-personal); Christianity
and ‘narrative Judaism’ (mainly second-personal) and
Buddhism (‘no-personal,’ i.e. no personal God or relation).
 This talk focuses on ‘faith,’ the root virtue of a second-person
relation to God by grace (divine adoption) in Catholicism.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you! ...You were
with me and I was not with you ... You called and cried to me and broke open my deafness: and
you sent forth your beams and shone upon me and chased away my blindness: you breathed
fragrance upon me, and I drew in my breath and do now pant for you: I tasted you, and now
hunger and thirst for you: you touched me, and I have burned for your peace.”
Augustine, Confessions 10.27.38. Translation from The Divine Office: The Liturgy of the Hours According to the Roman Rite (London: Collins, 1974), 225*
Distinctions:
God, philosophy,
religion and faith
3/24/2016
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FAITH AND SCIENCE:
ARE THEY COMPATIBLE?
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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Mgr Georges Lemaître, Father of the Big Bang
Mgr Georges Lemaître (d. 1966), a Belgian Catholic priest, proposed what became known as
the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the origin of the Universe, deriving what became known as ‘Hubble's
Law’ in a paper in 1927, two years before Edwin Hubble confirmed the expansion of the
universe. He also proposed the way in which the theory might be tested by searching for
radiation from the Big Bang. He died on shortly after having learned of the discovery of cosmic
microwave background radiation, proof of his intuitions about the birth of the Universe.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
Page 19
Fr Lemaître was honoured by the
Church: he was made president of
the Pontifical Academy of Science
in 1936 and a Monsignor in 1960.
By contrast, as late as 1948,
astronomers in the Soviet Union, a
state constituted officially on the
basis of an atheist Marxist system,
were urged to oppose the Big Bang
theory as ‘promoting clericalism’
(cf. Kragh, Cosmology and Controversy (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 262).
Mgr Gregor Mendel, Father of Modern Genetics
Gregor Mendel (d. 1884) was an Austrian Augustinian priest and scientist often called the
‘father of genetics’ for his study of the inheritance of traits in peas (between 1856 and 1863
Mendel cultivated and tested c. 29,000 pea plants). Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits
follows particular laws, later named after him. Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in
Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn, but largely ignored for nearly half a
century. The rediscovery of Mendel’s work prompted the foundation of genetics.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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Fr Angelo Secchi, Father of Astrophysics
Fr. Angelo Secchi (d. 1878), S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, made the first
spectroscopic survey of the heavens, classifying stars by four spectral types. He also studied
sunspots, solar prominences, photographed solar corona during the eclipse of 1860, invented
the heliospectroscope, star spectroscope, telespectroscope and meteorograph. He also studied
double stars, weather forecasting and terrestrial magnetism. He is considered to be the father of
the ‘spectral classification of stars,’ leading to an understanding of their physics and evolution.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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Fr Nicholas Steno, Father of Stratigraphy
Nicolas Steno (d. 1686) was the founder of stratigraphy, the interpretation of rock strata. He is
credited with the law of superposition, the principle of original horizontality, and the principle
of lateral continuity, which are the building blocks for the interpretation of the natural history
of rocks and the development of geology. Note that a Catholic layman, Georg Pawer (d. 1555)
earned the title ‘father of mineralogy’ for his great work On the Nature of Metals.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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Fr Boscovich S.J., Father of Field Theory
Fr. Boscovich’s Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis (1758) developed a theory of matter as
consisting of many dimensionless points, with the mutual attraction of any pair of points being
some general function of the distance between them, represented by an oscillatory curve. Field
theory are now fundamental to modern physics. Einstein’s efforts in 1919 to create a unified
theory of physics was based upon extending Newtonian theory along the lines of Boscovich,
who was also an early advocate of atomic theory. Yet few textbooks mention him today.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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Fr René Hauy, Father of Crystallography
René Haüy (d. 1822) was ordained a priest and had a strong amateur interest in science.
Examining the fragments of a calcareous spar, he was led to make experiments which resulted
in the statement of the geometrical law of crystallization associated with his name. Haüy is also
known for the observations he made in pyroelectricity. His brother was Valentin Haüy, the
founder of the first school for the blind, its most famous student being Louis Braille.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
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Women as Early Scientists in Catholic Italy
La versiera di Agnesi, which means ‘the curve of
Agnesi’, read by Cambridge professor John Colson as
‘l'avversiera di Agnesi’, where ‘avversiera’ means
‘witch’. The mistranslation stuck.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (d. 1799) was one of a number of remarkable women scientists
associated with the University of Bologna in the 18th century. Others include Laura Bassi (d.
1778), Anna Morandi Manzolina (d. 1774), and Maria Dalle Donne (d. 1842). Agnesi is
credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus. Elena
Lucrezia Piscopia (d. 1684) was the first woman to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
In 1750, Maria Agnesi was appointed by Pope Benedict XIV to the chair of mathematics and
natural philosophy at Bologna. To put this achievement in perspective, Winifred Merrill was
the first woman to be awarded a PhD in mathematics in the United States – in 1886.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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World exploration and the first scientific maps
Geographical Exploration
Marco Polo: c. 1254 –1324, 24 year exploration of
Asia covering 15,000 miles
The First Scientific Maps:
Diogo Ribeiro’s version of
the Padrón real (1529)
Prince Henry the Navigator, 1394 – 1460: Azores,
West Coast of Africa.
Bartolomeu Dias, 1488: southern tip of Africa.
Christopher Columbus, 1492: America
Magellan's expedition of 1519–1522: first
crossing of Pacific; first global circumnavigation.
____________________________
Catholic Explorers also founded and named vast
numbers of countries and cities, such as San
Francisco (St Francis) and São Paulo (St Paul)
Fr Matteo Ricci, SJ,
1552 – 1610
The Gregorian Calendar from 1582
Detail of the tomb of Pope Gregory XIII celebrating the introduction of the Gregorian
Calendar, on 24 February 1582. The Gregorian Calendar with its leap years is now used almost
all countries worldwide. Much of the work was done by Aloysius Lilius and Fr Christopher
Clavius SJ, drawing from measurements using meridian lines in Italian basilicas.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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Is atheism genuinely the friend of science?
Examples of the persecution of intellectuals in the atheist regimes of the twentieth century,
especially in the USSR and Communist China: Nikolai Vavilov, who was murdered; Andrei
Sakharov, who endured internal exile; and the Chinese 'Cultural Revolution,' during which
intellectuals of all kinds were denigrated and persecuted as enemies of the people.
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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Faith and science: are they compatible?

Most of the time, modern science deals with matters that are
not directly connected with faith at all, often involving
measurements, laws and quantities.

What should be clear from these examples is that there are no
grounds for supposing a naïve hostility to exist between faith
and science, or that being a person of faith precludes
fruitfulness in science and intellectual life at the highest levels.

But is there a stronger causal connection between faith and
fruitfulness in science? Is the weak conclusion the best that we
can offer: that faith and science are not incompatible .... ?
Faith and science:
are they compatible?
3/24/2016
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VALUE: DOES FAITH HELP US
UNDERSTAND PERSONS AND
THE WORLD?
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 31
Does faith help us understand anything?

Faith may not oppose science, but why should those seeking
knowledge care about faith at all?

Faith does not teach us about mathematical laws and leads us
to very few facts about the world that we cannot find out by
other means. So what does faith ‘do’? What is its value?

I propose three responses: (a) how faith has shaped ideas and
institutions; (b) how faith shapes our understanding of the
human person; (c) seeing what happens when faith is removed.
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
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Faith forming understanding: via philosophy
Principles adopted, introduced or transfigured
by Catholic intellectual life:
THE PERSON
SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENT
FREE WILL AND INTELLECT
VIRTUE ETHICS UNIFIED BY CARITAS (LOVE)
SECONDARY CAUSATION
THE FOUR CAUSES
CRITICAL REALISM
MATTER AS GOOD, NOT EVIL
OBJECTIVE AND NATURAL LAW
IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
NATURE AND SUPERNATURAL GRACE
St Thomas Aquinas O.P.
1225-1274
SECOND-PERSON RELATEDNESS TO GOD
PRINCIPLE OF NON-CONTRADICTION
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
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Faith forming understanding: via time,
history, records, progressive ‘evolution’
St Bede the Venerable
(623/4 – 725). Father
of English History
The standard worldwide system for counting the
days of the year, the Gregorian Calendar, 1582,
named after Pope Gregory XIII.
Escarpement: used in
cathedral clocks,
monasteries and town
halls by c. 1200.
600
400
CHRIST
BC
200
Giovanni De Dondi's
astronomical clock, the
Astrarium, built 1364,
Padua, Italy
AD
0
200
400
600
History as progression centered on Christ rather than an endless repetition
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
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Page 34
Faith forming understanding: via education
Monasteries, where manuscripts
were copied, developed and
preserved for centuries, helped
save civilisation after the
barbarian invasions of the fifth
century. These orders taught
Europe to read again.
Lindisfarne Priory (f. 635), famous for
Lindisfarne Gospels. Like other
monasteries in England, Lindisfarne was
destroyed by Henry VIII.
Roughly 10% of children in England today
are educated in Catholic schools, and these
schools tend to be oversubscribed.
Across the world, Church schools educate
nearly 50 million students worldwide and
provide much of the education in many
developing countries.
King’s School
Canterbury,
possibly
founded by St
Augustine in
597, the
world’s oldest
extent school
There were over 50
universities in Catholic
Europe by the time of the
Fall of Constantinople in
1453. These universities
included Bologna (1088);
Paris (c. 1150); Oxford
(1167); Salerno (1173);
Vicenza (1204); Cambridge
(1209); Salamanca (12181219); Padua (1222) and
Naples (1224).
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 35
Faith forming understanding: via law
From the 12th century, Catholic scholars such as Gratian
drew together the terms of Revelation, Roman Law (esp.
the Christian emperor Justinian), together with
Visigothic, Saxon, and Celtic legal elements, with Greek
philosophical dialectic. The result effectively created the
‘science of law,’ jurisprudence, and a wide range of
concepts we still use today, such as:
AGENCY OR REPRESENTATION
‘SOCIETAS’ (‘PARTNERSHIP’) AND
‘UNIVERSITAS’
NATURAL AND POSITIVE LAW
THEORY OF CONTRACTS
LAW AS A UNIFIED SYSTEM
FIDUCIARY TRUST
LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP AS A PROFESSION
OBJECTIVE LAW, WHICH EVEN THE MOST
POWERFUL RULERS CANNOT CONTRAVENE
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 36
Faith forming understanding: via society
Catholic social teaching envisages society as a garden rather than a
machine, in contrast to much modern political philosophy (e.g. Rousseau)
St Ambrose confronting
Theodosius, c. 390.
The distinct powers of the state and
Church defend society, teaching and
sacraments, but the fruitfulness of the
‘garden’ arises from divine inspiration
and personal initiative at a local level.
A healthy Catholic society has
many diverse institutions: for
example, families, parishes,
religious orders, guilds, distinct
national identities, and is
Modern principles derived from Catholic Social Teaching include:
subsidiarity (Fr Oswald von Nell-Breuning; Pope Leo XIII in Rerum culturally diverse, e.g. Italian
city states, Spain.
Novarum), developed by Belloc and others into distributivism.
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 37
Faith and the ‘person’
•
The uncertainty regarding the meaning of ‘person’ is associated
with a surprising forgetfulness about its origins.
•
Introductions, reference works and dictionaries of philosophy
generally overlook the theological origin of the term ‘person’,
taken from the Latin word persona (Gk. prósōpon / hypóstasis )
and then adapted to meet the needs of early Christian theology:
•
A rare exception is Robert Spaemann (2006):
“Without Christian theology we would have had no name for what we now call “persons”,
and, since persons do not simply occur in nature, that means we would have been without
them altogether. That is not to say that we can only speak intelligibly of persons on explicitly
theological suppositions, though it is conceivable that the disappearance of the theological
dimension of the idea could in the long run bring about the disappearance of the idea itself.”
Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference Between “Someone” and “Something”,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 17–18 (Personen, 27).
The mystery of ‘persons’
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The symbiosis of persons and theology
Part of “Holy Trinity with Mary
Magdalene, St John the Baptist and
Tobias and the Angel” by Botticelli
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 39
The symbiosis of persons and theology
•
The association of persons and theology is not accidental.
Spaemann claims that we would not have had a concept of
‘persons’ without theology. Conversely, it would also be
impossible to have Christian theology without persons.
•
The challenge is that Christian teaching regarding the Trinity
and Incarnation cannot be expressed without error or
contradiction using the tools of classical philosophy alone.
Example. Try to express the Trinity using Aristotelian philosophy alone.
Are the Father, Son and Holy Spirit substances? If so, there are three
Gods. Are they accidents? This the ancient heresy of ‘modalism’ (the
three are simply modes of one God. The doctrine cannot be expressed
without an additional principle, which became what we call a ‘person’.
The mystery of ‘persons’
3/24/2016
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Human beings as persons
•
With the Father, Son and Holy Spirit defined as ‘persons’,
human beings were also quickly described as persons.
•
The precise genesis of this development has not, to the best
of my knowledge, been traced, but the probable origin is the
Christian doctrine of divine adoption, by which a human being
becomes an ‘adopted child’ of God, hence ‘Our Father’.
•
The social implications of this development were profound. A
human being was no longer simply a ‘rational animal’, a
‘citizen’ or ‘slave’ (cf. Varro, ‘instrumentum vocale’), but called
to become an adopted child of God. St Paul’s Letter to
Philemon, written on behalf of a slave who is now the
‘brother’ of his master, shows the influence of this thinking.
The mystery of ‘persons’
3/24/2016
Page 41
Social and legal implications of ‘persons’
•
The notion of a ‘person’ had many consequences for the origins
of the Western legal tradition in the 12th and 13th centuries.
•
For example, the notion of a ‘corporate person’ gradually
emerged with the development of jurisprudence. A ‘corporate
person’ is not simply an aggregation of persons, but is treated, in
some ways, like a single person, with rights and responsibilities.
•
From this development, inspired also by the notion of the Church
as ‘corpus Christi’ (the body of Christ) came the possibility of
stable associations such as universities and corporations that
could outlast their members. There were over fifty universities in
Europe by the time of the fall of Constantinople (1453).
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
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Page 42
The continuing mystery of the ‘person’
•
The problem, however, is that a philosophical understanding
of the notion of a person has remained difficult.
•
The Boethian definition, ‘individual substance of rational
nature’ can be seen as a retrograde step: an attempt to write
the concept back into classical terms of substance and
accident, reintroducing old theological and moral problems.
•
Neither classical philosophy, influenced by organic
metaphors, nor modern philosophy, influenced by geometry
and formal structures, have provided a way to understand
and express what is meant by a ‘person’, which remains a
slightly ‘orphaned’ metaphorical principle today.
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 43
Inadequacy of organic or geometric ‘root
metaphors’ for understanding persons
Human persons are also natural beings, but persons cannot be expressed
simply in terms of a philosophy of natural substance and accident, such as
the philosophy of Aristotle, inspired by generic biological prototypes.
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 44
A different approach?
•
St Thomas Aquinas proposed a new
way to understand what is meant by
a ‘person’. ST I, q.40, a.2, ad 1, “The
persons [of the Trinity] are the
subsisting relations themselves.”
•
This proposal is novel because in
Aristotelian philosophy, ‘relation’ is
an accident of substance. In
Aquinas’s proposal, by contrast, a
‘person’ can be a relation.
•
But what does this mean? How is it
possible to understand this claim?
St Thomas Aquinas O.P.
1225-1274
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 45
First-person relatedness to objects
A person
with the
virtues
P
O
Some stance
Some object
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 46
Faith and ‘second-person relatedness’:
Aquinas’ account of human flourishing
God
G
O
A person
with the Gifts
Some object
P
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 47
Joint attention as a metaphor for gift-based
movement, removing our spiritual autism
The most appropriate
metaphor for understanding
what Aquinas means by giftbased movement is joint
attention.
In Aquinas’s moral framework,
the gifts are dispositions that
enable a joint attention or
second-person relationship
with God.
Grace as secondperson relatedness
to God
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Page 48
Why Limbo (‘pure nature’) is not enough
“There in Nirvana, why should she ever
come out? Yet she was ours as well as
her own, and we wanted her with us. If
what we had to offer was not enough,
we had nothing beside it. Confronted
with a tiny child’s refusal of life, all
existential hesitations evaporate. We
had no choice. We would use every
stratagem we could invent to assail her
fortress, to beguile, entice, seduce her
into the human condition.”
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 49
BENIGNITY (“HOLY FIRE”)
The Fruit of the Holy Spirit
which makes a person ‘melt’ to relieve the needs of others
Beatitude
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”
Faith + Infused Justice + Gift of Piety
Treating other persons as children of God –
one’s adopted brothers and sisters
Justice (in the natural, Aristotelian sense)
The virtue of rendering to each and to all what belongs to them.
“My heart
has become
like wax; it is
melted within
my breast”
Psalm 22
Converging insights: philosophy,
science and theology
•
What seems to be emerging from philosophy, science and
theology is the extent to which persons are constituted
relationally, specifically in terms of the ‘I-thou’ relation. What
it means to be a person, to flourish as a person and to attain
that flourishing are all inherently second-personal.
•
In Christian theology, second-person relatedness is with God
through grace. In developmental psychology, the secondperson is typically a parent or caregiver, but in both cases the
‘I’-’thou’ relationship is the key to development. In theology,
the culmination of this relationship is divine friendship.
•
In the history of Western art, we can also see what happens
when second-person relatedness to God is removed.
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 51
1432
Van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece or The Adoration
of the Mystic Lamb, completed in 1432
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Page 52
1524
Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of St Jerome,
completed in 1524
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1569
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters,
completed in 1569
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1821
Constable, The Haywain, completed in 1821
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1890
Vincent van Gogh, Wheat field with Crows,
completed in 1890
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1947
Jackson Pollock, Enchanted Forest,
completed in 1947
March 24, 2016
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2011
London Riots, 2011
March 24, 2016
Page 58
The chaos from right-brain impairment
Source:
McGilchrist,
The Master
and His
Emissary,
Yale 2009
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
March 24, 2016
Page 59
Faith as the beginning of the life of grace
“In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the
Hebrews (v. 1) we find a kind of definition of
faith which closely links this virtue [of faith]
with hope … Faith is the hypostasis of things
hoped for; the proof of things not seen”
Saint Thomas Aquinas, using the terminology
of the philosophical tradition to which he
belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a
habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the
spirit, through which eternal life takes root in
us and reason is led to consent to what it does
not see. The concept of “substance” is
therefore modified in the sense that through
faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in
embryo”—and thus according to the
“substance”—there are already present in us the
things that are hoped for: the whole, true life.”
ENCYCLICAL LETTER SPE SALVI OF THE
SUPREME PONTIFF BENEDICT XVI TO THE
BISHOPS, PRIESTS AND DEACONS MEN
AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS AND ALL THE
LAY FAITHFUL ON CHRISTIAN HOPE
Given in Rome, at Saint Peter's, on 30 November,
the Feast of Saint Andrew the Apostle,
in the year 2007, the third of my Pontificate.
The Magisterium on the loss of grace
7. Thereupon there came into being and spread far
and wide throughout the world that doctrine of
rationalism or naturalism, — utterly opposed to
the Christian religion, since this is of supernatural
origin, — which spares no effort to bring it about
that Christ, who alone is our lord and savior, is shut
out from the minds of people and the moral life of
nations. Thus they would establish what they call
the rule of simple reason or nature. The
abandonment and rejection of the Christian
religion, and the denial of God and his Christ, has
plunged the minds of many into the abyss of
pantheism, materialism and atheism, and the
consequence is that they strive to destroy rational
nature itself, to deny any criterion of what is right
and just, and to overthrow the very foundations of
human society.
First Vatican Council,
Dei Filius
24 April 1870
The Magisterium on grace and
Catholic enlightenment
Pursuing the purpose which is proper to her – that of saving
mankind – the Church communicates the divine life to men. But
not only that; in some way she casts the reflected light of that
life over the entire earth. She does this most of all by the healing
and uplifting influence she has on the dignity of the person, by the
way she strengthens the bonds of human society and imbues the
everyday activity of man with a deeper meaning and significance.
Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, N.40
How faith ‘adds value’ to understanding

Faith is the root disposition of the life of grace, a life of secondperson relatedness to God that dispels our ‘spiritual autism’.

This life of grace forms our understanding of persons, shapes our
ideas and institutions of our culture and helps to form a particular
‘right-brain’ cognition of the world, a framework within which facts
and reasoning (‘left-brain’) can be organised.

The lesson from art since the sixteenth century rejection of the
life of faith is that our perception of nature gradually decays. In
the longer term, science may not be immune from this decay,
even though we continue to accumulate new facts.

It may not be coincidental that a loss of faith has been correlated,
in the West, with an epidemic of narcissism (first-person
obsession) and objectified (third-person) treatment of persons.
Does faith help us
understanding persons
and the world?
3/24/2016
Page 63
HOW DO WE HELP FAITH TO
‘DO’ WHAT IT IS MEANT TO DO?
How do we help faith
to ‘do’ what it is
meant to do?
3/24/2016
Page 64
What would help to nurture faith?

To draw on two thousand years of faithformed genius to communicate that
belief in God and a life of faith is
intellectually respectable.

To impart some basic historical facts,
e.g. Catholic formation of universities
etc., to inoculate against falsehoods.

To show the value of faith in shaping
our world, especially via ‘organic
apologetics’: roots (history and origins
of our civilisation) and fruits.
“You will know them by their fruits.” Matthew 7:16
How do we help faith
to ‘do’ what it is
meant to do?
3/24/2016
Page 65
What would help to nurture faith?

Faith helps form understanding, a mainly right-brain cognitive
operation (seeing the whole or ‘big picture’, cf. the ‘Eureka!’ of
Archimedes). Right-brain cognition is imparted principally by
images and narratives that evoke embodied experience to
enable metaphoric understanding (words to life).

Our children need to know the parables of Christ; the key
narratives of the Old Testament (inc. the ‘spiritual sense’ of
these narratives – e.g. Exodus as the story of a soul); the
heroic figures of Christian history, especially certain saints;
the story of our civilisation in a Christian key, Christian
literature (e.g. Lewis, Chesterton etc.) and films.

The experience of Christian art and its interpretations,
providing cognition by means of both halves of the brain.
How do we help faith
to ‘do’ what it is
meant to do?
3/24/2016
Page 66
Resources to help (but we need more)
How do we help faith
to ‘do’ what it is
meant to do?
3/24/2016
Page 67
... and a little humour helps...
How do we help faith
to ‘do’ what it is
meant to do?
3/24/2016
Page 68
Prayer as essential to nurture faith and
second-person relatedness to God
Luke 1:38
I am the handmaid of the
Lord; let it be to me
according to your word.
Luke 1:46
My soul magnifies
the Lord
What else do YOU think we need?

How can the Church, Catholics in universities, publishers such
as the Catholic Truth Society and others be helpful?

I open the floor to you ....
How do we help faith
to ‘do’ what it is
meant to do?
3/24/2016
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