Exploring Catholic Theology

And therefore real understanding takes place rarely in a flash of intuition but rather gradually, in the play of analysis and conversation, stretching across both space and time. But this means that the individual thinker, isolated in the confines of his subjectivity—in a word, the ideal Cartesian philosopher—is by no means the optimal knower.

Whereas Hume held that the mind is a kind of empty theater in which impressions and sense data appear for neutral viewing, Newman opined that human intelligence is a lively, active, inquisitive power, constantly sifting and weighing evidence, making judgments, asking and answering questions.

Pascal’s raisons du coeur (reasons of the heart) meet Newman’s cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks unto heart), and both clearly inform Avery Dulles’s postcritical epistemology.

Dulles’s postcritical approach, as we saw, favors faith and rests upon a hermeneutic of trust rather than one of suspicion.

This means that love always respects the integrity, individuality, and dignity of the one it addresses. To evangelize, therefore, through aggression and intimidation or by means of institutional coercion is directly repugnant to the way of love.

What is theologically important about the resurrection—and this comes through in all the Gospels—is that God’s power is greater than the sinful powers of the fallen world.

a word, Jesus draws the scattering and accusing powers of the sinful world out into the open where he can do battle with them, and he makes vividly present, by his own actions and words, another way of being in the world, the way of the kingdom, God’s order.

As St. John put it, “The light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light” (see John 3:19).

As Ambrose of Milan put it, “If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you; the other belongs to the man who has no shirt.”

God is not a supreme being alongside other beings but rather ipsum esse, the sheer act of to-be itself, in which and through which all finite things are constituted. This means that as I find my center in God, I simultaneously find your center, the center of everyone else, and indeed the center of brother sun and sister moon.