Catherine Pickstock has ably sketched the achievement of Plato and his reports of the academy of Socrates as an early counter-signal to a time when the philosopher has come to embody the empirical rather than reason. But she has also had the courage, in the current philosophical marketplace, to develop the forgotten insights of Plato’s lyceum—that the pursuit of wisdom took place within the context of a cultic association, i.e. within the cycle of prayer and offering which characterised the early activity of the university. So while poetics were abandoned in Plato’s vision for the Republic, hymns to the gods were not. It is in this context that we can take time out of the great putsch of post-war British philosophy with its dismissal of metaphysics as nonsense, and attend to the reflections of a Continental philosophe from a far country. In possibly the last great work of his pontificate, Fides et ratio, we have, arguably, the most far-reaching and mature contribution of his time and one which justifies his election as a philosopher-pope. It is not inappropriate to suggest that Plato could not have wished for more in his designs for a city-state than one headed by a philosopher-king. So it seems appropriate to repristinate that sapiential dimension of philosophy for which the Pope calls in the concluding chapters of the encyclical and suggest ways in which British philosophers might grow as a result.

One of the most notable features of Faith and Reason is its plea for metaphysics. The twentieth century saw interest in metaphysics recede to a low ebb. There were signs, however, that the tide had already begun to turn before Pope John Paul made his plea. Calls for metaphysics sometimes came from unexpected quarters. At the end of 1996, Clifford Longley wrote in The Tablet:

I have only one point to make about the recent Papal Encyclical Fides et Ratio in this paper, albeit a complex one. I want to draw attention to the fact that the apparently simple and self-evident term ‘reason’ in English is deceptively so, so that when we hear the term ‘reason’ in the title “Faith and Reason” we hear named a marker for something with a long and difficult history. I do not intend to resolve that history in this paper— which would be much too ambitious a task, but rather to relate its complexity to some of the Encyclical’s underlying themes.

I want to begin by commenting on the sheer awfulness of the English translation of Fides et Ratio. The English translation is often frankly and mischievously inaccurate. Let me give you just one example (of very many). At §49 the English tells us “The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others”. The Latin text has “Suam ipsius philosophiam non exhibet Ecclesia, neque quamlibet praelegit peculiarem philosophiam aliarum damno.” Those two last words “aliarum damno” emphatically do not mean “in preference to others” but rather “to the condemnation of the others”. The sense here is quite different: the English implies that one philosophy could be chosen by the Church from a range of systems: rather like preferring white wine to red for a meal. The implication of the Latin is much sharper: to choose one philosophy would be to pronounce a kind of judgement on the others. A quite different inference.

I want to speak about the place of Fides et Ratio within the parameters of the twentieth century Thomistic revival. To do that I must first describe the revival Three strains of Thomistic interpretation characterized the revival before Vatican II: Aristotelian Thomism, Existential Thomism and Transcendental Thomism. The first two were a posteriori in their epistemology. The mind abstractly draws its fundamental conceptual content from the human knower’s contact with the self-manifestly real things given in sensation. Among the concepts abstracted are the transcendentals, chief among which is the ratio ends, the notion or concept of being. It is an analogical commonality, and so a sameness within difference, whose analogates are absolutely everything, actual and conceivable.