The Lives of the Saints

POSTED BY GIGI ZAPIAIN--
Just a couple of weeks ago, our group finished the ENDOW course, Edith Stein: Seeker of Truth. We always take more time to complete any of the studies than what is usually expected, but nobody minds. Our bunch likes to do a lot of processing.

Lives of the saints are something I’ve read and enjoyed since childhood (remember The Picture Book of Saints by Fr. Lawrence Lovasik?) and in college my then-boyfriend introduced me to author Louis de Wohl, who wrote, among other things, a series of historical novels in the 1940’s and 50’s on saints and various figures pivotal in the history of the Church. One of my favorites was The Quiet Light, about the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, who disappointed and defied his illustrious and prosperous family of noble title. Their ambition was for young Thomas to be appointed a cardinal or at least a bishop – and were horrified by his taking a vow of poverty and joining a rag-tag mendicant order, the Dominicans. The plot hatched to tempt the young monk and shame him into leaving is as timeless as Thomas’ response is unique. His simplicity left his confessors in tears; while his writings, the fruit of his intense life of study, prayer, and contemplation, stunned the known world. After that novel, I had a new appreciation for my medieval philosophy class.

I really hadn’t connected saints with philosophy much since then until delving into the Edith Stein study. I found myself thinking about some of the things I had learned and remembered that it was Aquinas who said that “philosophy is the handmaiden of theology.” This was certainly true for Edith, whose earnest and scholarly study of philosophy could never quite answer her questions about reality, the nature of existence, and the ultimate meaning of life. It was only sometime later, through the example of Christian friends and colleagues, that Edith was able to drop what she called “the barriers of rationalistic prejudice” and became open to observing and experiencing without preconceived notions. Later, reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, Edith became convinced of the truth of Christianity.

Philosophy deals with what can be known by human reason and can take us only so far, but if it is grounded in integrity and reality it can prepare the mind for the leap between empirical or natural truth (always with the help of grace) – to revealed or supernatural truth – that which we could only know through God’s Revelation. And because both natural and revealed truth come from the same Source, they can never be in opposition to one another.
In our own day, Pope John Paul II observed that that too often, modern thought claims that human reason and supernatural faith are at odds. In his encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), the pope writes that faith and reason are not only compatible, but essential together. Faith without reason, he argues, leads to superstition. Reason without faith leads to relativism.
Hmm. Maybe that encyclical could be the topic of a future ENDOW study. In the meantime, I think I need to reread St. Teresa’s autobiography. I’m no philosopher, but given what it did for Edith Stein, I might have missed something the first time around.