Theology and philosophy in Roman Catholicism

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Consider the following passage from Thomas Guarino’s The Unchanging Truth of God? Crucial Philosophical Issues for Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022), pp. 13–14:

Theology, then, can never be captive to any mode of reasoning, whatever its provenance, precisely because Christian thought has the obligation to purge every viewpoint of errors. Aquinas argues that theologians, in subjecting philosophy to the Christian faith, change water into wine. Similarly, Newman states that the Church is a vast treasure-house, cleansing erroneous ideas of their imperfections, then stamping them with the Master’s image. More recently, Balthasar, speaking of the theological use of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, insists that Christian thinkers must always adopt Mary’s posture: “deposuit potentes de sede.”

This is the theoretical horizon within which one should understand Catholicism’s frequent invocation of metaphysical themes. Metaphysics is helpful for defending the claims of the Catholic faith—especially the assertion that dogmatic statements are universally, definitively, and perpetually true. But it is always metaphysics adduced within the house of faith, as a way of explicating and supporting crucial doctrinal convictions…

In fact, the truly crucial issue for Catholic theology is this: How do the affirmations of the Christian faith find theoretical support in the philosophical order? This is assuredly not an attempt to justify divine revelation by philosophy or to place theological claims in an alien Procrustean bed. It is, rather, to ensure that faith’s claims are also able to satisfy the legitimate demands of human reason. Catholicism insists that its dogmatic teachings are perduringly and universally true.

I have for some time suspected that the approach to the relationship between philosophy and theology in Roman Catholicism (and in catholic theology more generally, for that matter) is fundamentally asymmetrical. Theology takes itself for granted and makes use of philosophy only to the extent that it is useful for furthering theology’s own purposes. Theology is never really critiqued or corrected by philosophy per se. Guarino’s remarks here serve to illustrate this point. Theology “has the obligation to purge every viewpoint of errors.” Theology makes use only of “metaphysics adduced within the house of faith, as a way of explicating and supporting crucial doctrinal convictions.” Guarino admittedly writes that theology tries to find theoretical support in philosophy in order “to ensure that faith’s claims are also able to satisfy the legitimate demands of human reason.” But of course it is theology itself that ultimately decides which demands of human reason are legitimate and which are not. It’s not as if theology would submit to the demand of human reason that a person commit to an idea in a manner proportionate to the amount of evidence one has in favor of its truth. The value of philosophy for Roman Catholic theology is thus purely instrumental. It is merely a tool for theology’s self-propagation and self-advertisement that can on occasion outlive its usefulness and thus be thrown aside. This means too that Roman Catholic theologians who relate to philosophy in this way are not really doing philosophy but rather merely making use of it. They are not philosophers but ideologues. If I am to be forgiven for the extreme mode of expression, this is to my mind really a kind of rape of philosophy and of human reason by theology. Within the arena of philosophy, distinct points of view must commend themselves on the basis of the strength of argument and clarity of reason. Roman Catholic theology does not really enter into the arena but only sponsors certain gladiators so long as it likes the way they fight. And of course what I say here applies not only to Roman Catholic theology but to catholic theology more generally, even in its Eastern Orthodox and traditional Protestant forms, to the extent that theologians from these traditions would agree with the general picture Guarino paints.