#theo 301

[christendomstudent]

Words from Abroad

Ciao and welcome to the first Core Knowledge post from Rome! After pilgrimage week in Assisi and Siena and then a week of intensive Italian classes, we’re finally dipping into the full academic load of our semester. The curriculum here in Rome is both a continuation of the Core Curriculum and a Rome-specific academic adventure, including courses on The History of Medieval Philosophy, Apologetics, Italian, and Art and Architecture. We haven’t had many sessions yet, but I can already tell that these classes will be an invaluable part of the Christendom experience.

Italian, of course, is the most important thing to start learning in Italy since it affects how we live every day here and how much we can truly engage in the culture. Professor Leigh Anne Benzaia has the challenging task of teaching thirty-eight students to speak basic Italian in just a few weeks, but she has done a wonderful job so far. During intensive Italian week and then this past week, she has led us through a mix of written exercises and speaking practice, teaching us both the grammar and syntax of Italian and some helpful phrases for general use while we’re here. She even delved a bit into the history and linguistics of Italian, which I found particularly fascinating. Many of us took Latin at Christendom during our freshman and sophomore years, and we’re finding that it prepared us for Italian very well. Some of us also learned some basic Italian on our own before coming, but having Professoressa Benzaia explain concepts and answer questions has been extremely helpful. Overall, I think our class will prepare us very well to go out and discover Italy in a deeper way than we would if we had to make do with English, and we’ll have another speaking language to add to our skill sets, which is always a plus!

Medieval Philosophy with Deacon Matthew Rensch is another high-speed class, and one that is both part of the Core and part of the Rome experience. So far, we’ve talked about what distinguishes medieval philosophy from other philosophical currents throughout history, and then talked a bit about Boethius and those who followed him. Boethius is considered the father of medieval philosophy, which was a general trend of philosophizing from a monotheistic standpoint and trying to unite reason with faith, using each to illuminate the other. Thomas Aquinas, one of the most-read authors at Christendom, was one of the crowning glories of this style of philosophy, but Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy and various other authors and works from the time have been very influential as well. Some of the biggest questions in both the Christian faith and in the minds of thinkers throughout history were tackled during this time period, and so we’ll be tackling them this semester as well. The problem of evil and many other questions about God and His relationship to humanity are on the syllabus, and I’m excited to see how our group (in which philosophy majors abound!) discusses these issues.

Apologetics tackles many of the same issues, but from the standpoint of the faith. Fr. Christopher Lebsock has already taken us through a review of Aquinas’ proofs for the existence of God plus some more arguments by Peter Kreeft, and then turned the discussion to the problem of evil: namely, the apparent conflict between God’s goodness and omnipotence and the fact that there is evil in the world. If God is all-powerful and all-good, a non-believer might ask, then why doesn’t He stop all the evil in the world from happening? This can be a stumbling block leading some people to doubt God’s existence. However, even this tough issue can be addressed, and Fr Lebsock did a great job showing us today that there are rational arguments that God must exist, must be all-good, and must be omnipotent. We concluded class with a discussion on free will and how it is necessary for the possibility of love, which, Fr Lebsock pointed out, is such a great good that even the chance of evil doesn’t outweigh it. God chose to create man with free will, knowing that people would often choose to commit horrible sins, but He allowed even that for the sake of letting people also choose to love. It may not be a completely convincing argument, but it was one I had never heard before, and it does seem to make sense, especially considering God’s greatest act of love--coming to earth to let evil be done to Himself. I’m eager to continue discussing issues like this and finding arguments for the faith so that I will be a stronger Catholic, and hopefully bring the faith to others.

Of course, everything about Rome is a learning experience and, if we allow it, a spiritual one. We’ve toured churches, navigated bus routs, and learned how to order coffee already, but taking classes to deepen our understanding of Rome’s history, art, and culture as well as our faith is really the core of our time here. I’m looking forward to everything, both academic and extra-curricular, about the rest of this semester, and I think my only regret in coming here is that the time has to be so short! If you come to Christendom, I hope you’ll get to come here too, and see all the beauty and wonder that Rome has to offer. Arrivederci!

[christendomstudent]

A Vision of Vices

Greetings from week two! This week we studied far too many interesting things to detail here, but I’ll do my best to share themes from two classes that interconnected particularly well.

In moral theology, Dr Matthew Tsakanikas is starting out in good old Aristotelian/Thomistic style: with a definition of moral theology. However, that question is a little more complicated than you might think, since, as Dr Tsakanikas discussed this morning, moral theology wasn’t considered a separate category from the rest of theology until the Church had existed for many centuries. Instead, in ancient times, theology was taught as a whole, and morality was centered around the virtues, which are the Holy Spirit’s way of transforming our humanity to join us with God. For the last few hundred years, ethics was considered a branch of theology, but was often truncated or simplified so that it focused on obligations and laws, and what the bare minimum requirements are, rather than pointing to blessedness and eternal life as the goal and virtues, especially charity, as the way to attain that goal. According to Dr Tsakanikas, Vatican II strove to bring back a more complete understanding of moral theology by returning to the tradition of Aquinas and the Church Fathers. I had never learned any of these historical facts before, and had never really thought about whether moral theology was about laws or virtues; now I’m seeing more completely how the virtues are all forms of love, and that God is love, so the goal is not simply  to fulfill legalistic requirements, but to go beyond the laws and actually enter into God’s own life. To be born again in Christ means to become sons of God as Christ is, and to be a son of God is to become God by God’s grace. This is what moral theology studies: the way to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and allow Him to turn us into God. Moral laws are helpful, of course, but only if the ultimate goal of eternal happiness, eternal union with our Father, is kept in mind. One particularly profound point Dr Tsakanikas made was that as the Holy Spirit turns us into God, we actually become more human, because to be more virtuous is to be more complete. Human nature alone cannot ever become God, but human nature is made to be acted on by grace. We are made to be eternally happy by being drawn into the Trinity, and the way to allow this to happen is the virtuous life.

Thinking about virtues and the moral law entails thinking about vice as well, and the fallenness of man, which is a subject often explored through literature. In The English Novel this week, we read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a famous novella by Robert Louis Stevenson. In the story, Dr Jekyll is a scientist and well-known, upstanding citizen of Victorian London who experiments with separating the evil impulses in man from the good. He succeeds in separating his own ignoble side from his good side and lets the ignoble side run wild as the elusive, deformed-looking Mr Hyde. He thinks that by doing this he will be able to get all of Mr Hyde’s energy out, so to speak, and then turn back into Mr Jekyll and go on living without any consequences, his urge to sin having been relieved. Of course, this does not turn out quite as he expected, since Mr Hyde actually begins to grow larger and more powerful as he is exercised more. Instead of being two people, a perfect Dr Jekyll and a depraved Mr Hyde, the scientist instead becomes merely a more evil man. Besides being a well-written and engaging story, this got me thinking about how man’s nature isn’t really two-sided, with both sides needing to act and release energy, but rather man is unified, and his nature is perfected by acting virtuously. The world today often tells us that if we just let our passions go and do whatever we want, at least occasionally, then we’ll feel fulfilled and be able to stay in control of our lives, but really, whatever we do creates a habit. A habit of self-control and good deeds is a virtue, and will eventually make us happy, at least in the next life, but a habit of running wild and acting impulsively will only destroy our ability to control ourselves at all. Mr Hyde is often described by other characters as being “inhuman”, and this is accurate because Mr Hyde is pure evil; evil is inhuman, and good is human. Just as we learned in moral theology, we become more human by encouraging our “good side”, not by encouraging Mr Hyde.

As usual, this is just scratching the surface of all the connections to be made and the implications to be drawn from studying a variety of liberal arts at the same time. I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and I hope you keep reading each week!