By Bernard J. F. Lonergan

Against this background we can reflect on the problem of a philosophy of education for Catholics. Obviously we do not want a philosophy of educa­tion in the sense of secularist philosophy, where philosophy is a successor to religion – religion is a thing of the past. In much of today’s education ulti­mate criteria come from philosophy in the sense of human reason and human freedom as ultimate.

Again, we do not want a philosophy exclusively in the Cartesian sense of philosophy as a discipline that recognizes a certain superiority of theology but proceeds simply on its own independent criteria and in accord with its own independent methods. The fact is that what we have is a Catholic edu­cational system, with primary schools, high schools, colleges, and universi­ties. That is the concrete fact, and it exists because it is Catholic. Again, we agree with the democratic idealists, not for their reasons, but because we consider all men to be the brothers of Christ. That is the solid basis for all democratic idealism, and it is our basis, too: ‘Love one another as I have loved you’ (John 15.12). ⁵⁶ Thus Fr. William Cunningham’s book, The Pivotal Problems of Education,⁵⁷ simply takes it for granted that a Catholic philosophy – education will be supernaturalist. So we are not interested in a philosoph­y of education simply in the Cartesian sense of a discipline separate from and, in its methods and criteria, independent of our religion.

In the third place, a contemporary philosophy of education cannot simply be the medieval symbiosis of philosophy and theology. For such a view does not provide proximate criteria for an examination of the new learning. The new learning is what has come into being since that philosophy was worked out, and that philosophy does not offer a direct synthesis for the assimilated mass of the new learning.

I began, then, by distinguishing three senses of the word ‘philosophy,’ and now I find that none of the three fits, at least proximately, what is wanted for a Catholic philosophy of education at the present time. We want

not the secularist philosophy, because de facto we are interested in Catholic schools and colleges, high schools and universities; not philosophy exclusiv­ely in the Cartesian sense of a separate discipline totally distinct from the Catholic religion and Catholic theology; and not directly and simply philosop­hy as it was thought out in the medieval period, since that philosophy is not connected intimately enough with the new learning.

There are further difficulties, however.⁵⁸ The first has to do at least with the traditional interpretation of medieval philosophy. On this view, philoso­phy is philosophy simpliciter; not ‘philosophy of … ‘ We hear at the present time of a philosophy of mathematics, a philosophy of science, a philosophy of nature, a philosophy of history, and a philosophy of education. This mode of speech is strange to anyone brought up on scholastic fare, where philosophy is a subject by itself, not a subject of some other subject; it con­sists of major and minor logic, ontology, cosmology, psychology, natural the­ology, and ethics; it is not a philosophy of everything else.

Now, how does one get the notion of a philosophy of … ? a philosophy of X? What kind of a philosophy is that? That raises a rather technical philo­sophic problem. I think you will see a connection between it, though, and my book Insight, ⁵⁹ and this from two angles.

Insofar as one attends merely to concepts, one can think of universals being applied to particulars: the universals would be the philosophy, and the particulars that to which they are applied. But you also have to think of understanding, insight, as the ground of conception. This understanding arises from sensible data. If we think in this way, we will see a quite different relation between intelligence and sensible data. Intelligence, understand­ing as insight, as the ground of conception, has a quite different relation­ship with the particular and the concrete from the relationship found in the abstract concepts ‘the universal’ and ‘the particular.’ There are, then, at least two ways of having a theoretical discipline connected with particulars: one through insight into phantasm, the other through the subsumption of particulars under universals. (Later we will see a further mode that can be developed out of a mathematical notion of fundamental importance at the present time, group theory.) ⁶⁰

A second difficulty is that medieval thought was not historical thought. It was concerned with eternal, timeless truths rather than with genesis, devel­opment, history. But the problem of education is the problem of education today, the problem of educating, not primitives, ancient Egyptians or Greeks, medievals or people of the Renaissance, but people of today. It is the problem of the development of the individual up to the level of the times, the level of development reached by Western culture and civiliza­tion.⁶¹ How do you bring today into the categories of any philosophy? It can­not be done if philosophy deals simply with timeless truths. How do you incorporate into your philosophic ideas such a notion as the present time?

Again, how do you account in your philosophy for the notion of the devel­oping individual, the prephilosophic individual who may become a philos­opher, or function as a philosopher if he is not one? What does philosophy do with the notion of the development of the individual or the development of society? If you conceive philosophy simply as a matter of eternal, timeless truths, you have no answer to such questions. Such philosophy cannot be timely; it is timeless.

Thirdly, philosophy as traditionally conceived is essentially neutral. As you know, about the year 1930 there flared up a big dispute as to whether there could be a Christian or a Catholic philosophy. An account of the dis­pute and a present opinion on it can be found in Maurice Nedoncelle’s Existe-t-il une philosophie chretienne? ⁶² Is there any more a Catholic philosophy than there is a Catholic mathematics? Some would answer flatly in the neg­ative. But if there is no more a Catholic philosophy than a Catholic mathe­matics, then how can we have a Catholic philosophy of education?

Fourthly, the traditional Catholic conception of philosophy is not existen­tial. It has been concerned with the per se, not with the individual coming to grips with the meaning for him of true propositions. It has been con­cerned to pick out and label which propositions are true. But to show how propositions come to have a meaning for me in my living, what is true for men as they exist in this world at the present time, is not a question proper to Catholic philosophy as it has been traditionally conceived. That belongs rather to theology, for man as he exists in this world is affected by original sin, gifted with the offer of divine grace, and faced with the alternative of accepting or rejecting this offer. All of these determinations pertain not to philosophy but to theology. How, then, can you have a Catholic philosophy of education, if you do not consider man as he is in this world? The problem is technical, but it reaches deeply into one’s very conception of a philoso­phy. Traditionally, the issues I have been outlining are taken care of by the­ology, by training in ascetics, by liturgy, the sacraments, the entire life of the church. They were not questions that were discussed, though, in philoso­phy. If we are to have a Catholic philosophy of education, then, we need first to provide a positive answer to the question, Is there a Catholic philosophy at all?

Can the difficulties I have just mentioned be turned? If they are to be turned, one has to say that medieval philosophy was a moment in a philosophia perennis, in a perennial philosophy. One cannot think of philos­ophy as something cut and dried and settled for all time several centuries ago, so that all you need do on any problem is look up the books and get the answers. Once when I was attending a meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, I went into a nearby cafeteria for lunch, and noticed two priests at another table. There was a famous clinic in the city, and the priests were talking about symptoms. At first I did not catch on, but assumed they were at the philosophy convention, too. Finally, they turned to me and asked if I was at the clinic. I told them I was not, and they said, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ I answered that I was at the philosophy conven­tion. ‘Protestant?’ they asked, and I said, ‘No, Catholic.’ ‘Well, what are you having a Catholic convention in philosophy for? You can’t change first prin­ciples!’ – and they went back to their symptoms. You cannot have a Catholic philosophy of education on that basis; philosophy in the past has not been thought out in terms of concrete situations and concrete developments. That type of question was taken care of by theology.

But if one conceives the medieval philosophy as a moment in a perennial philosophy, in a philosophy that remains true to itself and yet develops, that preserves its identity and yet takes over the mastery of different successive ages, then one can, I believe, develop a Catholic philosophy of education. I believe that the perennial philosophy is essentially an open philosophy, that it can take cognizance of individual and historical developments, that it can be concrete, existential in the general sense of that term (not in the sense of particular existentialist schools), and that it can be historical, Catholic, and a ‘philosophy of .. .’ It need not be confined simply to timeless truths and conclusions from universals to particulars. I hold that belief principally as a theologian, and in fact I consider such a development essential for Catholic theology. For Catholic theology is the theology of a historical religion that was providentially prepared by the revelation given to the Hebrews,⁶³ that arose at a particular point in historical time, in the fulness of time, and that has developed over the course of two thousand years. If theology is to deal with theological problems of origins and development, if it is to enter into the concrete, it must have an appropriate philosophic tool. Moreover, the places, and so once more it is essential that Catholic theology have a philo­sophic tool that can differentiate itself according to the differences of men at different times and places.⁶⁴ Finally, I also believe that such a develop­ment has its roots and its fundamental justification in what is best in the medieval tradition. Any work I have done has been largely devoted to that end. I wrote a series of articles on gratia operans in St Thomas. The articles are based on my doctoral thesis, which deals with human will in the con­crete situation of this life.⁶⁵ Again, I studied intellectual theory in St Thom­as.⁶⁶ Thirdly, my book Insight heads in the same direction. There is more of a tendency among non-Catholic reviewers than among Catholics to find the book very traditional, but I believe that it is fundamentally an expression of traditional thinking.

It is in this light that I wish to tackle the problem of the philosophy of edu­cation: What precisely are the types of thinking and development needed to bring our philosophic thinking into contact with a host of other problems in theology and other fields, but for us during these two weeks into contact with problems of education?

So much for my introductory discussion. The last two points concern, first of all, the things that are new in our time, the concrete meaning of this talk about a traditional wisdom suited to a preindustrial, predemocratic, prescientific age and, second, the theoretical problem of a Catholic philos­ophy of education. The new factors that we have to cope with are the masses, the new learning, and specialization. On the theoretical side, our problem is that, as traditionally conceived by Catholics, philosophy is not a ‘philosophy of .. .’, not a subject of other subjects, but philosophy simply. There is a host of problems connected with that shift in conception, and some of them are very technical. I believe that shift in conception can be effected on a basis strictly in harmony with the tradition, and it will be my attempt to offer some indications as to how this can be done. That will be the contribution I can make to this Institute. I am not a specialist in educa­tion, but I have suffered under educators for very many years, and I have been teaching for an equally long time. As a physicist will listen to a mathe­matician, and doctors to a biologist, so in a somewhat similar fashion you can listen to me as I speak about philosophy and its relation to theology and to concrete living. But most of the concrete applications, the ironing out of things, will have to be done by you who are in the fields of education and philosophy of education.

Editor’s end note: I left the numbers for the footnotes in but did not provide the footnotes because they refer almost exclusively to what he wrote in his lecture notes. I found the book in the education section at the University of Toronto Bookstore which is at the corner of College and St. George Streets.