The Catholic Creation of Hollywood's Golden Age, or How the Church Saved the Movies, Part One

Those with a general understanding of the motion picture industry and its history will already know that Catholics have been extremely influential as directors and actors. A variety of directors like Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo and North by Northwest), John Ford (Stagecoach and The Searchers), Frank Capra (It's a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe), Leo McCarey (Duck Soup and The Bells of St. Mary's), Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull and The Departed), and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather and The Conversation) represent the broad range of the Catholic experience in America, representing those Catholics of Irish, Italian, and English ancestry. Their films cover all the great genres of cinema, from horror and Western to romantic comedy and melodrama. Many commentators have explored the Catholic themes in these men's films, with Catholic understandings of family and community, struggle and redemption, and moral liberty and free will painted on celluloid.

Yet Catholic thought reached the American public beyond these men and their movies, especially during the time period known today as the “Golden Age of Hollywood," a period from roughly 1935 to 1960. The Catholic Church nurtured cinema as an art when it was only considered an industry by the American Government. The Catholic Church helped guide the creation of some of the greatest movies ever made, using subtlety instead of directness; symbols rather than graphic imagery. Lastly, the Catholic Church used the motion picture industry to help integrate Catholics into mainstream American society, going from the Papist "other" to the next-door neighbor. Sadly, apart from several (largely negative) works written over the past two decades, the Church's role nurturing the creation of motion picture industry has been largely forgotten. Over the next few weeks, I will make a series of posts exploring these points and related topics so one can gather a greater understanding and appreciation of the Catholic heritage of American film, why the Church's role should be viewed as a positive influence in the creation of this art form, and the power cinema had and continues to have on our society as a whole.

The Catholic Church has always known the power of art. As Pope Pius XI wrote, "The essential purpose of art... is to assist in the perfection of the moral personality, which is man, and for this reason it must itself be moral." Additionally, nos. 2500 and 2501 of the Catechism state, "The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous joy and moral beauty... To the extent that it is inspired by truth and love of beings, art bears a certain likeness to God's activity in which he has created. Like any other human activity, art is not an absolute end in itself, but is ordered to and ennobled by the ultimate end of man."

Typically though, art has become almost an archaic term, especially in talking about movies. The term "art" instantly conjures up thoughts of museums, classrooms, and, in absence of a more appropriate term, Rastafarian relics of the 1960s. Instead, many people today consider film "entertainment," immediately creating a picture of escape and abandonment. This distinction in modern society leads to a lesser understanding of the power of film as an art form, a truth the Church has known since the advent of moving pictures. Even though the Catholic Church considers film as a form of art, the American government has not always been so enlightened.


(Directors, from top left clockwise, Alfred Hitchcock, Leo McCarey, Frank Capra, Francis Ford Coppola, John Ford, and Martin Scorsese)

Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, local censorship boards sprouted up across America, especially in the mid-west, cutting and splicing scenes from the new "moving pictures" in order to protect public morals and decency on the assumption cinema was not covered by the free speech guarantees of the American Bill of Rights. These boards were typically branches of the local police department, made up of individuals with little to no training in art. There was no philosophical underpinning to the methods of these local boards, leading to differing standards in different communities. Moviegoers in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago could see three different versions of the same film, all of different lengths, depending upon how much the local censorship board objected to in the film. It was a very slow, ineffective, and confusing system.

The film industry fought back. Going all the way to the United States Supreme Court, motion picture producers stated their product was protected as a form of free speech. In this case, Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915), the Supreme Court disagreed. As the Court stated in its unanimous decision, "…the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit… not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution [and, thus, the United States Constitution], we think, as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion."

This decision led to more state censorship boards being established and the threat of the Federal government censoring movies for public consumption. The film industry tried to deal with this new reality in creating the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), made up of the nation's largest studios. William Hays, a Presbyterian and Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding, was placed in charge, with the hope that his contacts in the federal government would help relieve its threats of censorship. To help achieve this goal, several codes of self-regulation, the most famous of which was the "don'ts and be carefuls," a random list of what things were and what things were not allowed in the motion pictures, were agreed to by the major studios.

However, while they were agreed to, there was no enforcement mechanism in the studio system to make sure they were following these regulations. The situation only got more pressing with the advent of talking pictures in the late 1920s. At this point, federal regulatory agencies were proposed to deal with immorality in film, similar to how the FDA regulates the quality of meat. The film industry had to do something, and that is when the Catholics were called in, leading to the salvation of the film industry.

In my next post, I will write of three influential Catholics who shaped the film industry in America for two decades: Father Daniel A. Lord, S.J., Joseph I. Breen, and Martin J. Quigley and the creation of the Motion Picture Production Code.

~TNT

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
Frank Capra

Part two is available here.

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Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post IV)

Continued from Insight into Faith (Post III).

Blaise Pascal believed that Christianity alone embodies and offers the holistic solution for the quest of the mind and heart for truth. Pascal’s solution is simple, we must listen to God. Pascal, a brilliant scientist, mathematician, philosopher, inventor, writer and so forth, had a spiritual experience in his thirty first year of life that he recorded and kept in the lining of his jacket.

Memorial

In the year of grace, 1654, On Monday, 23rd of November, Feast of St Clement, Pope and Martyr, and others in the Martyrology, Vigil of St Chrysogonus, Martyr, and others, From about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve,

Fire!

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, (Ex 3:6; Mt 22:32) not of the philosophers and scholars.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy.
Peace. God of Jesus Christ.
“Thy God and my God.” (Jn 20:17)
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.
He is to be found only in the ways taught in the Gospel.
Greatness of the Human Soul.
“Righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee, but I have known Thee.” (Jn 17:25)
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have separated myself from Him. “They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters.” (Jr 2:13) “My God, wilt Thou leave me?” (Mt 27:46)
Let me not be separated from Him eternally. “This is the eternal life, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and the one whom Thou hast sent, Jesus Christ.” (Jn 17:3) Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ

I have separated myself from Him:
I have fled from Him,
denied Him,
crucified Him.
Let me never be separated from Him.
We keep hold of Him only by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day’s training on earth.
“I will not forget thy words.” (Ps 119:16) Amen.

Pascal discovered the paradox of man which true religion teaches. Man is both a source of greatness and wretchedness. Even in wretchedness man learns of his greatness. Pascal points out that man can realize that something is missing because he has fallen from a previous nature, the state of grace that one ought to be. Knowledge of privation points out knowledge of one’s true condition. Pascal wittingly indicates that while a person with no eyes is inconsolable “probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes” (409). Man seeks what is intrinsic to his nature including knowledge of reality. Since reason cannot know all of reality, the limitation of man becomes more evident and humbles man to receive grace and knowledge as a gift.

Christian religion points out two truths that man must know to remain balance in his knowledge. “There is a God whom men can know, and…there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him” (555). Knowledge of only one of these truths leads to opposite extremes. Knowledge of God but not of sin leads to the pride of the philosophers while knowledge of sin and wretchedness but not of a redeeming God leads to the despair of the atheists. It is God in his gift of faith that makes both truths known to man. The need for redemption becomes both evident and reasonable. Through faith Jesus Christ can be recognized as “the end of all, and the center to which all tends” (555). The true God is different from limited view of God that philosophy offers because God not only brings the world into motion but also restores His creation that has turned against Him. As a God of love, He fills the hearts of man to make them aware of their condition that they might freely return back to Him. Without the mediator of Jesus Christ, man falls into either atheism or deism. To accept such possibilities is not reason, but grace through which all things become possible and miracles become evidence. To reject such possibilities is not reason, but an emotional problem that fails to dive into the infinite mystery that surrounds all things.

This worldview follows the assumption that the highest act of a human person is not knowledge and reason but faith and love. We are made to know precisely because we are made to love and be loved, not vice versa. While reason is very much a function of the human person it is not humanity’s end in itself but a means to understanding the choices available to the will. Faith is to the will what knowledge is to the intellect. They complement one another rather than replace each other. There is no competition intrinsic to the either faith or reason that would put one in conflict with the other. Rather human minds create the conflict. Even when affirming a judgment of the intellect, this willful act follows a trust in the correlation of an idea and its ability to represent reality regardless of whether this process is something that the judger is consciously aware of. This implicit trust is made explicit in Christianity and its belief of Jesus Christ as the Logos and Word of God. God stands beyond all creation and orders everything accordingly to His will and sees that it is good. Rather than destroying reason, Christianity inherently fosters the scientific and philosophical enterprise, precisely because it believes in the intelligibility of the world ordered by a divine Logos. Even if such world is ultimately shrouded in mystery, we can through the gifts of revelation and reason have positive knowledge about creation and the creator.

“Without the Creator the creature would disappear...But when God is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible." --Second Vatican Council

Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post III)

Continued from Insight into Faith (Post II).

Living in France where a favorite pass-time of the French was to gamble, Pascal plays with the idea of statistical gain and risks in his famous wager argument. Appealing to gamblers, Pascal shows how disbelief in God may risk more than any person would want to lose, the possibility for eternal happiness. This argument is not meant to justify belief in God but to show that belief in God is at least reasonable, and may be one of the most reasonable decisions a person will ever make. The point of this argument is to ready the heart for true faith. In other words, Pascal is taking up the banner of John the Baptist in hopes that a person may be prepared for humbling receiving grace. He does not believe that his argument in any way can provide that faith.

Reason alone, as great as it may seem, has limits and lacks the ability to judge definitively whether God exists or not. This is not to say that belief in God is not reasonable nor that an argument cannot be philosophically derived, but God is not merely an idea of the intellect. Any judgment would insinuate a conclusion that goes beyond the evidence available to the mind. Such a fact, regarding the existence of God as an objective and evident judgment, lies beyond and prior to the mind. Ultimately reason may aide the person in finding God, but the heart must first seek Him. Thus, we can neither affirm nor deny the existence of God based on reason alone. However, Pascal insists that every person must wager whether “God is, or He is not” (233). Since reason cannot speak and must remain neutral, the wager becomes a question of happiness rather than knowledge. Accordingly, Pascal sets the stakes on the fact that God is. “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing” (233). Considering the possibility of the existence of God completely as a gamble and ignorant to the case in reality, there exist an equal chance of whether or not God exist, heads or tails. Betting that God exist when he does in fact exist, a person would hypothetically gain eternal happiness. If God does not exist that person has lost nothing. Following the nature of the gamble, the only way a person gains anything is if God does in fact exist. If God does not exist then a person neither gains nor loses in any of the scenarios. Therefore a person can reasonable gamble that God exists if they are remotely interested in the possibility of gaining eternal happiness. Since a person must gamble, belief becomes the most reasonable bet. The person sacrifices a finite chance in which nothing is gained for an infinite chance in which everything is to be gained.

Pascal realizes that belief from such a wager hardly seems like faith at all. In fact, he indicates that belief from a gamble is not true faith; but the wager only purposes to open a person up to the possibility of receiving faith. When struggling with faith, Pascal recommends that such a person live as if they did believe and follow the paths of those who have had similar struggles with atheism in finding their way to faith. By living as a believer a person is more inclined to believe and opens himself up to the supernatural grace of faith. Eventually, such a life may reveal the nothingness this life has to offer in comparison to the infinite happiness to be found in God.

Belief that God exist is not equal to faith in God. Where the mind may think of God, the heart experiences Him. Pascal says, “Knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him” (280). Both reason and the heart represent reality and know truth; only each tells us something different. Pascal says that the heart knows first principles such as “space, time, motion, [and] number” (282), and reason would be absurd to demand reasons for these intuitions of the heart. A person can only wait patiently for grace of faith when realizing the insufficiency of reason.

Next week will be the final post on this series of Blaise Pascal and his insight into faith. I will discuss the paradoxical nature of man’s greatness and wretchedness, the purpose of religion, and the primacy of humility.

Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post II)

Continued from Insight into Faith (Post I).

Blaise Pascal identifies a paradox of reality within the nature of humanity. Man stands torn as a medium between the two opposites of infinity and nothingness. After assessing the hopelessness in the ability of man to discern either the infinite or nothingness, Pascal turns to religion and faith as the way to leave the pit of despair. Since man can neither see the beginning, the nothingness from which he came, nor the end, the infinite towards which he is headed, only faith in God can bring comfort. Pascal, critical of Descartes, makes sure not to reduce God to a rational backing of a worldview and shows that we also need faith in God. Besides, God ultimately disappears past man’s ability to conceive or imagine.

Blaise realizes that everything, once reflected upon seriously, leads to its own mystery. All of man’s reason and man himself becomes as nothing in relationship to the infinite reality that surrounds him. Yet when man tries to study himself he dives into an infinite number of smaller and vaster things heading towards nothingness. Although man wants to comprehend everything he is left with understanding nothing.

For Pascal, man, when left to his own accord, is in a very helpless condition. Man seeks happiness in science and many other pleasures only to discover that he cannot become happy with himself or his abilities. Man orients all his activities in hope to become happy in the future but he cannot find contentment in the present. There is an excessive amount of activity without an overall purpose. Many run around in a helpless condition because both senses and reason fail in attaining truth. The senses deceive reason with faulty appearances and vice versa until both become enemies with one another and both are cast into doubt. The mortal condition of man in the dark has no way out of itself through itself.

A different approach must be taken, that of faith. Man must go out of himself and trust in more than his reason. But man must have something beyond himself to allow him to do this. Pascal believes that God places religion into both the mind, by reason, and the heart, by grace, and He does not force it upon either. Since there is not enough evidence to neither confirm nor deny God in the world, the grace of faith becomes a very valuable gift. In the context of this faith, if man thinks as he ought he can find this faith reasonable. Faith in God orders the ideas of man and allows him to be content with himself through his relationship with God. Instead of slipping into the darkness of meaningless, faith allows man to live with the assurance of eternity. The latter becomes a more reasonable way to live while the former creates a state of despair.

Blaise Pascal uses reason to show the reasonability of faith in God. Reason cannot produce faith in God but only open a person to the possibility. Through exploring the nature of both faith and reason, Pascal continues to affirm the limitations of reason and need for faith in a world shrouded with mystery. Pascal realizes the inability of reason to bring man into knowledge of God, and that all proofs for God from the works of nature only help those who already see God in all things. In hopes to open the mind to listen to the reasons of the heart, Pascal offers a wager, a gamble, by which he shows that faith may be the most reasonable way to live one’s life. Pascal also identifies two truths in religion and shows how both are intrinsic to understanding reality. Reason and heart need to work in harmony to receive the grace of true knowledge about one’s own condition and the need of God. Ultimately Pascal shows the Christian Religion as the culmination in which the knowledge of reason and heart find their calling.

In my next post I will take up the Pascal’s famous wager. My hope is to show its complexity within the context that Pascal intended it. I have heard many simplified versions that do not do justice the actual argument. Taken in its context this argument is very beautiful and compelling in its own right. Pascal does not merely try to appeal to reason but to the entire person including one’s desires and hopes as well as reason. This argument was never meant to replace faith but to merely open a person up to its possibility. Pascal sees faith as a divine grace that follows a person’s humility. Often reason blind to its own presuppositions and unjustified metaphysical beliefs against the possibility of God gets in the way of this openness, which is the very reason that Pascal’s argument is so beneficial.

Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post I)

This is the beginning of a series of posts on Blaise Pascal. I believe he is often a neglected and misunderstood Christian thinker, and I have experienced people misquote and critique him without actually understanding the perplexity of his thought. In the mid 1600's, Blaise Pascal made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and science. After a conversion experience he reflected on his faith and eventually started writing his Apology for the Christian Religion, a work never finished. After he died, the notes for this work were collected and named the Pensees or "thoughts". Sadly many people use Pascal’s insights and especially his famous wager out of context. Here I hope to explore and reflect on some of his central ideas, particularly those regarding faith and reason. Quote numbers from Pascal in this series of posts refer to the numbers in which his collection of thoughts was labeled.

Reactionary to the pure rationalism of Descartes, Blaise shows the interplay and reasonability of faith. Pascal claims that reason is utterly insufficient for an absolute argument that proves the existence of God. Some may venture to argue that reason currently can or may be able to one day demonstrate that some higher power or God does exist, but in the end, even with this belief, reason still fails in itself to discern the nature of God as Trinity; this type of insight relies on the gift of revelation and faith. Knowing that a God exists isn’t the same as knowing who that God is and is even further removed from a relationship with such a God. While I agree that philosophy gives much insight into God and there are very convincing arguments that may be made for God's existence, most arguments for God only offer a reasonable hypothesis in which a person is left with a fundamental choice of belief. In other words, the existence of God is not so evident to faculty of reason that one would be forced to believe in God without it being an act of faith rooted in the will.

If God were only an abstract universal like laws governing numbers and mathematics, faith would be quite unnecessary, but because God is an eternal subject we are called to have a relationship with him that translates concretely into our lives in an act of faith. The God of Christianity is not merely an impersonal prime mover that stands at the beginning of a causal sequence that has, through time and space, resulted in our own existence, but God is the One who actively sustains all reality and presently keeps us existing while moving us towards our ultimate end--telos. Such a God that loves us and cares for our own sake wants more than our knowledge of Him but our love which is mediated through a personal relationship, trust, and obedience. Faith is fundamental in belief of God and this faith requires at least as much as an act of the will as an act of the intellect.

To be human, “man’s response to God by faith must be free, and…therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act.” “God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced…This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus."

–CCC 160

Furthermore, faith is important in everyday life. It underlies the humility necessary to receive truth. Our minds most earnest attempts cannot discern the full nature of God, but this knowledge must be received as a gift through divine revelation. Our philosophical understanding may support what has been divinely revealed, but it cannot replace it. For these reasons alone it is important that Christianity emphasizes the need for faith and relationship with God. Neither a blind faith apart from reason nor reason divorced from faith is healthy, but faith must be balanced with reason.

If God is the creator and author of all things, than we can reasonably assume the both that books of nature (truth discovered through reason) and revelation (truth revealed through the Church) have the same author, namely God. Therefore, while faith points to that which is prior and beyond reason; neither of these books can contradict each other. As Aquinas pointed out to his contemporaries and the university: truth cannot contradict truth.

As I will explore in my next posts, the beauty of Pascal's thought is that it eloquently points out the limits of man in order to open man up to a relationship to Him who is without limits. The person truly open to all possibilities must then openly consider the possibility that God really exists and is really trying to enter into a relationship if only that person would believe.

Post II.

A little Augustine on Pantheism, Evil, and Platonism

Before Augustine became a Christian he had to overcome some serious intellectual problems. One of Augustine’s problems was his material conception of God. Even though Augustine did not conceive of God in the shape of human body he imagined him as something pervading all physical space of the world and continuing infinitely outside the world. Peter Kreeft calls this the ‘blob god’ because it envisions God as some sort of cosmic blob that encompasses everything. Augustine’s understanding of the real was limited to the external world of space and time, materialism, by which anything beyond lacked real existence. This hypothesis created a pantheism by which the more matter something contained, the more God it contained. Thus an elephant contained more God than the sparrow.

Since Augustine envisioned God surrounding and permeating all real and imagined bodies yet infinite in all directions, Augustine struggled to understand how evil originated. The second problem Augustine faced, the existence of evil, challenged him to question the corruptibility of God and/or creation. Influenced by Manichaeism, Augustine fought the idea that evil substances exist parallel to the existence good substances, and our souls suffer evil by becoming enslaved in flesh. This dualism made “it more acceptable to say your substance suffers evil than that their own substance actively does evil.” (Confessions).

Augustine dealt with the problem of evil and his sponge theory of God by reexamining the nature of God and creation. Based off the premise that God is the highest good and the incorruptible is better than the corruptible, Augustine concludes that God is incorruptible, immaterial, immutable, and evil cannot originate in God. God as the supreme Good makes all creation good, but created beings are lesser goods in comparison to God. Furthermore, neither evil nor matter could pre-exist God because this would make him less omnipotent by his reliance on something co-eternal to himself. God would no longer be the supreme Good.

Influenced by platonic philosophy and through a process of inspection, Augustine turned inward to his own mind. He went from external bodies to inward perceptions next ascending to his power of reasoning. In his reason he saw the power of judging values and discerned the immutable light, God, which transcended his mind and made his knowledge possible. In the hierarchy of being Augustine imagined God as the supreme good, man as a lesser good which could have immaterial ideas, and the rest of material creation as a lesser good but without immaterial ideas. God did not make all things equal, but he did make them all good. God is not infinite in the physical sense, but he holds all creation in existence by his power. Nor does He suffer the evil that creation does.

Evil is not a substance in itself but a corruption of something created good. Augustine links evil to a perversion of the will. All created things are good by the nature of their existence. Wickedness is “a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, …God, towards inferior things” (Confessions). Evil is choosing lower goods over the greatest good, God, by which the will orients itself towards nothingness.

The intellectual conversion of Augustine came when he started to focus inward rather than towards the external and temporal world of space and time. Platonic books and philosophy helped him make this transition. In fact, platonic philosophy gave him a perspective and context by which he could understand God’s transcendence; of course Augustine would not inherit the pagan beliefs of the Greeks. With other Church Fathers, like Irenaeus, Augustine was willing to accept truth wherever it was to be found, even in pagan texts, but not to the exclusion of true belief in Christianity and God. In a way, Christianity gave Augustine the content of his thought and platonic philosophy gave him a way to think about it. But philosophy itself cannot provide the fundamental truths about God nor provide the grace and humility that one needs to understand these truths.

Humble Inquiry Opens the Mind to Wisdom

Born into a culture and operating in a particular historical consciousness, the human mind stands in a paradoxical relationship to reality. From the moment of birth to death, the human mind dynamically begins assimilating experience and forming insights, yet the totality of reality always eludes us. As we struggle to understand the world around us and the world within us, our limited perspective teaches us one of the most important lessons in life. We can expect to learn very little about the world apart from a community.

Humility makes knowledge possible and must be practiced at all stages of life. By humility, I am suggesting that a certain receptivity must accompany our desire to know. This openness places us as a recipient of a gift, in this case, knowledge that could not have been achieved on one’s own. As a child we began to learn language and how to express our desires from others. Parents and adults are responsible for the formation of children, whether they realize it or not. While some instruction takes a formal dimension in school, most occurs in observation of others. One of the most significant sources of knowledge comes from everyday conversations and experiences. The interpersonal communication of the dialogue requires both individuals at some point to actively listen and receive what the other person communicates. Reading requires humility. The reader always assumes the position of receiving what the author has written. Yet, in all these experiences, something more than receiving occurs. The mind takes the experience and evidence provided and reflects to form insights. The mind strives to have a positive understanding of its experiences.

Many people take their knowledge for granted as they assume themselves solely responsible for their insights. Arrogance replaces a genuine search for Truth. Possibly this arrogance is what prevents knowledge from becoming wisdom. Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that wisdom as a virtue is not limited to the formally “educated” but that anyone through merit of their relationship to Truth can be wise. Those who fail to become wise fail to remain humble. When people exalt their own understanding as the ultimate “Truth,” they have created a false idol.

How do we remain both humble yet open to Truth? How can we have both positive knowledge about reality without reducing that reality to an idea in our mind? One solution is how we treat language. We need to treat language symbolically, realizing that all words point to realities beyond themselves. Saint Augustine speaks of the two dimensions of language, the literal and spiritual. The literal refers to the word itself and the spiritual refers to the meaning towards which the word is pointed- in other words, the signifier and the signified. In this paradigm we can have positive knowledge without claiming to have complete knowledge. We do not have to mentally reduce reality to a category of the mind to make it intelligible. Thus, all philosophy leads to mystery.

The medieval theologians and philosophers had a motto that guided their disposition to learning: “Fides quaerens intellectum” (Faith seeking understanding). When we are created in a relationship with God, we are placed in a relationship with Truth. The desire for Truth is an expression of an innate desire for God. A sound intellectual formation allows the mind to gain insight about its ultimate purpose and share this insight with others. We need to be able to intelligibly look at our spiritual experience, reflect, and gain insight in order to communicate mystery to others. This is why philosophy is so important to the “New Evangelization.” Philosophy shows the link between the human spirit and truth. It brings the person in touch with the great philosophical questions around man’s life and teaches him how to think critically and seek the Truth. All inquiry should be seen as a movement towards Truth. This journey must humbly occur within a community, or you are just elevating your own understanding. Seek Him who you are learning about for only this relationship can bring ultimate meaning to the insights you have.

“Many people have such a general and confused idea of God that their religiosity becomes a religiosity without God, where God's will is seen as an immutable and unavoidable fate to which one has to bend and resign oneself in a totally passive manner.” -John Paul II from Pastores Dabo Vobis