The Spirit and the Forms of Love
by Daniel Day Williams

Chapter 13: Love and the Intellect

We come at the close of our inquiry to an ancient and persistent question in Christian theology and in philosophy — the relation of love to the intellect. We have been seeking an interpretation of the meaning of love in the Christian faith. We have reflected on the biblical witness, the traditions of Christian thought, and the philosophical search for categories with which to talk about the world we experience. When we talk about love we feel a certain restlessness about formal concepts and logical analysis. If love can only be known through love itself, is not all intellectual analysis bound to fail? There are two sources of tension about this problem; the first comes from within theology, because faith transcends in some way the rational categories. The other arises in our culture, with its split between the drive toward scientific rationality and its existential sense of the meaning in experience expressed in myth and symbol. We need to examine these two aspects of the relation of intellect to love.

The Christian interpretation of the intellectual life has always shown a profound inner tension between two aspects of the truth which God has given in Jesus Christ. On one side there is the mystery of God himself and the supreme mystery of his self-revelation. God is known through his acts in which he discloses his power, his purpose, and his gracious intent. He is not reached at the end of an intellectual exploration. The truth of his mercy, in which he takes our sin upon himself, is not only beyond all rational expectation but beyond all human understanding. The Gospel is foolishness or scandal to all who approach it with anything other than the categories which the Gospel itself provides. Therefore the view that the Gospel is above reason has been one of the persistent assertions of Christian thought. In our day Karl Barth’s theology represents in the extreme form the position that the interpretation of the faith must arise within the revelation which God himself has given. It is not against reason, but it does not arise from reason, nor can it be subjected to the canons of human tests of truth. On this theme that the Christian faith is not another philosophy which can be grasped from within the general criteria of rational understanding there has been a consistent if not complete agreement in theology.

There is, however, another side to the Christian view of the claim of reason. The Christian faith has been able to cope with the development of human thought through the centuries because it has held that the mind belongs to the image of God in man, and has its rightful place in the interpretation of the truth of the faith. The first great commandment includes the injunction to love God with the whole mind (Luke 10: 27). Every Greek who heard the word Logos which the author of the Fourth Gospel used when he spoke of Christ as the Logos who became flesh, would understand this word, whatever its other connotations, to mean the eternal and intelligible order of things. The Logos is the truth which the mind seeks when it tries to understand the principles which govern the life of the world. One important implication of faith in the trustworthiness of God is this ultimate unity of truth. The Christians affirmed that this unity is manifest in Christ. ‘In him all things cohere’, says the letter to the Colossians (1:17). The apostle Paul has a profound sense of the mystery of the Gospel beyond all human reason, yet he protests against obscurantism. ‘Whatsoever things are true, lovely, and of good report, think on these things’ (Philippians 4: 8). Karl Barth says that Christianity should not associate itself with the irrationalist tendencies which characterize some forms of modern culture.¹ We see within Christian theology an internal restlessness which allows neither total rejection nor total acceptance of a purely rationalistic approach to truth. What is the relation of the love disclosed in the Gospel which has its reflection in all human love to the life of the intellect? Every interpretation of love brings us back to this question.

A discussion in secular terms of the relation of love and mind pervades contemporary culture in this ‘age of analysis’, as Morton White has called it. The intellect has triumphed in the form of scientific knowledge and technological skill. It has not only transformed man’s relationship to nature and his understanding of the world, but also it has altered man’s self-understanding. He conceives nature itself and his relationship to nature in new ways through the power which is now in his hands.

It is a paradox that our time which has seen such scientific conquests as mathematical logic penetrates the structure of the atom and the cosmos, at the same time seeks reality through the absurd, the irrational, and the form-breaking capacities of symbolic expression. The visual and dramatic arts have plumbed the realm of the Absurd, the Paradoxical, and the Creativity of Dissonance.²

While this juxtaposition of logic and the irrational is indeed a paradox, the two movements are connected. Man, the microcosm, unites diverse aspects of being. When the rational side of his nature grows strong and tends to rule, something within him moves in the contrary direction. Thus our age produces the rationalistic evolutionary philosophy of a Teilhard de Chardin, who interprets the course of the universe as a steady movement toward perfection. It also produces the despairing stoicism of Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship, in which man defies without ultimate hope the trampling march of unconscious power.³ George Orwell’s prediction of the devastation of a rationalized society in which man succumbs to an inhuman tyranny is countered by the contented, unheroic, and satisfied human existence of B. F. Skinner’s Walden II.⁴

Thus the issue concerning the relation of intellectual understanding to the guidance of human life is posed at the centre of twentieth-century culture. Science has increased immeasurably man’s knowledge of his environment, and of the incredible capacities and pathologies of the human organism. The question is whether man needs and has another mode of self-knowledge. The existentialist movement has tried to point to the limitations of scientific and rational understanding. The revolt of the existentialists has not been anti-intellectual, nor anti-scientific. It has sought to transcend science through reflecting upon the concreteness of experience. This concreteness includes the freedom, decisions, emotional tonality and all the distinctive structures of human consciousness including the irrational elements which may be expressible only in symbols which defy purely rational explication. John Wild has contrasted this way of understanding with that of objective reason in his analysis of the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt) disclosed in man’s subjectivity.⁵

When the relation of love to the intellect is an issue of such perplexity, the vocation of the intellectual becomes a question which gives rise to much dispute. Intellectuals have sometimes accused themselves of treason to humanity for failing to recognize and oppose the dehumanization of modern political and technological life.⁶ Anti-intellectualistic tendencies lurk within most contemporary life and they have especially deep roots in some phases of American culture.⁷ At the same time we are putting the greatest pressure ever known in human history upon the new generation to demonstrate intellectual capacity, master the technologies, and compete in a world where knowledge has become power in a frighteningly obvious way.

One thesis is that the intellect needs love and that love needs intellectual understanding. Without a right appraisal of this relationship love loses its integrity of aim and its balance, and intellectuality becomes self-destructive.

(1) FAITH, LOVE, AND REASON IN THE CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE

Each of the types of interpretation of Christian love has a theory of the role of intellectual powers in the life of faith and love. Augustinian, Franciscan, and Reformation theologies all come to a settlement with the place of the intellect, and they all leave many issues for Christian culture. A contemporary interpretation will owe something to each of these traditions. The view taken here is fundamentally Augustinian, but it qualifies St. Augustine because he fails to do justice to the power, openness and tentativeness of empirical reason. To that insight both Franciscan and Reformation theologies have contributed, but I shall argue that there are decisive aspects of man’s rationality which we owe especially to modern science. Theology must incorporate into its doctrine of reason the truth which God has made known through the scientific movement, sometimes against the opposition of church and theologians. The ‘History of the Warfare of Science with Theology’ is not simply a matter of the exposure of antiquated religious notions.⁸ The more important point is that the scientific movement, which arose partly through biblical and theological insights, has had to oppose theology for the sake of a sounder view of reason and more adequate methods of getting truth.⁹ In order to justify this view we need to consider again where Augustine leaves the relation of reason and love.

The essence of St. Augustine’s understanding of the relation of love to the intellect is that the intellect seeks the same object as love, that is, God’s being and his truth, but that the intellect can do its proper work only when it is oriented within the life of love. For St. Augustine this means that it is through agape with its consequent repentance, humility, and understanding of human limits that the intellect receives its foundation, direction, and fulfilment.

Augustine has a profound respect for the values of intellect in the sciences, in logic, and in philosophy. He continually appeals to the elements of rational structure in the mind and in the world to refute the sceptics. But he holds that the mind can recognize the reality of God only when it is oriented in the right direction, and this means that disoriented man with his misdirected love must be turned about. It is grace, the infusion of the divine spirit given through Jesus Christ, which accomplishes this. Augustine agrees with the Platonist that knowledge of the truth requires a re-orientation of the intellect through the discipline of the self, and a transformation of the spirit guided by love. Where he differs with them is that he takes his understanding of love from the Gospel of the incarnation, the grace of God given in Christ, rather than from the eros of aspiration toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, though he regards that eros as itself a reflection of man’s origin in love.

Augustine gives us his great formula: ‘Faith seeking understanding.’¹⁰ Faith means not primarily belief in dogma, though it includes such belief, but it is the self’s acceptance of the grace of God, its trust and self-giving in dependence upon God. Augustine estimates highly the rational understanding of which faithful reason is capable. He finds in the mind and its ways of knowing, analogies of the Holy Trinity, the very being of God. God is being itself. He is truth, goodness, and beauty. The mind, therefore, moves toward Him as it grasps the structures of the world. Thus the sciences and other intellectual disciplines can glorify God and articulate the pattern of his handiwork. For Augustine confidence in reason is not misplaced when it is faithful reason. The ontological argument which finds the truth of God’s existence in the very structure of the rational concept of God expresses the Augustinian confidence in the mind’s participation in the divine truth. It is in Augustine’s thought that the ontological argument to which St. Anselm later gave logical expression has its source.

Augustine is acutely aware of the limits to the mind’s power to understand God. ‘That which thou understandest is not God.’¹¹ The mind must acknowledge its finitude, and there is always more to be known. Charles N. Cochrane has said that Christianity’s greatest contribution to classical culture was its sense of the depths of personal experience which cannot be reduced to the general definitions of truth and justice by which classical culture tried to live.¹²

Christianity contributed its faith in the rational but inexhaustible logos, the source of a creative and dependable order, to western civilization. Whitehead regards this Christian foundation as an indispensable element in the rise of scientific method. Yet the Christian interpretation of the work of reason fell short and had to undergo a drastic purging in the course of modern thought. The reasons why this is so should not be over-simplified, but a major failure was the inability to see the significance of the method of empirical inquiry. There were other factors at work. Faith was closely identified with belief in dogma, and the metaphysical framework of dogma had incorporated a prescientific world view. Moreover, there were inadequacies in all ancient conceptions of the relation of experience to knowledge. There are problems in the nature of scientific theory and in the relation of fact and theory in which St. Augustine is not interested, and for which Aristotle himself had inadequate tools of understanding. It took centuries for the logic of scientific discovery to display its full complexity, and the interpretation of scientific theoretical development still goes on as Thomas Kuhn has shown in his The Structure of Scientific Revo1utions.¹³

What our time can learn from the Augustinian tradition is that the intellect in all its operations belongs in the service of love, and that intellectuality without agape loses its source of hope and its full power to learn about the world. The intellect has its own eros, the drive to know. St. Augustine recognizes and accepts this eros, but like all other eros, it falls into either despair or self-worship without the illumination and redirection of agape. We need, then, an Augustinian interpretation of the intellectual life, but one which has undergone the discipline of the scientific way of relating fact and theory in a continuing responsible inquiry. Let us see where such a revised Augustinianism would lead.

(2) THE NATURE OF MIND

Love has a history and so also does intellectuality. Many treatments of the nature of mind are vitiated by the assumption that the intellectual function remains identical in every culture. Intellectuality in religion is often identified with its Greek expression. Since Greek philosophers thought of God as the pure idea which is the goal of intellectual reflection, this, it is concluded, must be the goal of every rational attempt to understand God. I have put the point crudely, but it is astonishing how many modern theologians have accepted some such argument as final.

Two familiar arguments put intellect in opposition to love. While these rarely lead to an outright rejection of reason in religion, they give it a precarious and suspect place.

The first is that the intellect destroys, or at least depersonalizes, by analysis. ‘We murder to dissect’ (Wordsworth). Analysis is appropriate in the search for scientific knowledge, but it misses the concrete reality of personal experience. The intellect makes impersonal concepts out of everything it touches. Hence reason must be sharply curbed as a way to personal meaning and in the expression of faith. Emil Brunner, for example, based his entire theological construction on the premise that reason always seeks impersonal structures.¹⁴

The second argument is that the intellect is essentially self-centred and power-hungry. Reason tries to bring the whole of things into its own sphere and to master it. Hegel’s grandiose system with its claim to exhibit the absolute philosophy as the truth of Christianity is often adduced to show this self-worshipping tendency in rational thought.¹⁵

A qualified but similar view of mind is found in Father M. C. D’Arcy’s The Mind and Heart of Love, which we have already discussed.¹⁶ We can recall its main points. D’Arcy distinguishes between two ‘loves’, power-minded, grasping, self-assertive love and sacrificial, self-giving, heedless love. The first is identified as masculine and intellectual. It is the human analogue of eros. The second is feminine and intuitive, the analogue of agape. D’Arcy wants to keep the constructive aspects of both loves together in the Christian person. Neither can nor should be abandoned. Reason must be united with self-giving. ‘Eros and Agape are friends.’ This doctrine thus puts reason in a certain ineluctable tension with agape. Reason is essentially self-centred, self-fulfilling, and in tension with the sacrificial spirit of agape.

The view that love transcends reason and that therefore faith must go beyond reason is indeed characteristic of Christian thought. D’Arcy’s theory gives one version of this final judgment upon reason, its limitation in trying to grasp the full truth of love.

I suggest, however, that there is an important issue raised in this doctrine that reason is essentially grasping, imperious and self-assertive. For if this be so, love as agape must not only transcend reason but also in some sense contradict it, for the spirit of agape is never imperious and self-assertive. If D’Arcy’s view is correct there is nothing in reason which prepares the way for agape, or in any way leads the person toward it. This is a plausible position, and D’Arcy gives it a penetrating anthropological and psychological foundation. But attractive as it is, it leads to that anti-intellectualism which has supported the obscurantist elements in theology and religion, an outcome which D’Arcy certainly does not want. It leaves human culture hopelessly split between authentic understanding and faith informed by love.

I propose as an alternative to D’Arcy’s view the doctrine that reason in man is something other than the imperious will to control. It should be noticed that we are seeking the essential structure of reason in the midst of its distortions. There is no doubt that reason, under the conditions of man’s finitude and estrangement, is subject to every corruption with which it has been charged. It is quite possible that there is a pride of intellect which has a peculiarly strong hold upon anxious man and that the philosophical tradition may give some flagrant examples of it. One thinks of Immanuel Kant’s title of his book: A Prolegomenon to Every Future Metaphysic. Here the reasoner claims to shape the entire future thought of mankind.

But it is men who are prideful, not reason. The question is whether reason, man’s intellectual capacity, necessarily and essentially betrays the spirit of love. Here a reflection upon modern philosophy and science can help us, for at the heart of science there has been reason’s discovery of its context and its limitations. In following this clue to the nature of reason we owe most to Albert North Whitehead and process philosophy. Our view differs sharply from many traditional interpretations. It is not a deification of reason, quite the contrary; but it interprets the nature of intellect by considering the self-criticism which has been the essence of the scientific spirit.

First, we must specify what we mean by reason and intellect. We are talking about a specific function of the human psycho-physical organism. It is the function which conceives, analyses and relates the structures of anything in existence or in imagination. We may use the term ‘intellect’ in a somewhat narrower sense than reason. Intellection specifies the abstraction and conceptualizing function considered in relative independence of emotion or intuition, whereas reason may be used more generally for the entire concrete process of reflection, imagination, and interpretation. There are subconscious processes, intuitive perceptions, flashes of insight, all of which belong to the reason; whereas intellection is the recognition and construction of concepts.

We shall use reason as the more inclusive term, recognizing that it always has an aspect of intellection. All reasoning takes place in personal histories which involve drives, impulses, emotions, and other factors which are more than ‘rational’, however rationally they may be conceived and criticized. This doctrine of the unity of the person in which reason is a function within the total organism and its goal and needs is a characteristic theme of much modern philosophy. Pragmatism, existentialism and modern idealism have all tried to understand reason in its fully personal context. The process philosophers such as Bergson and Whitehead have given special attention to the implications of this view for understanding man and his philosophies. The reasoner has valuations, desires, purposes and emotions. The injunction to ‘listen to reason’ must reckon with the fact that reason is never effective by itself. We become reasonable by exercising personal restraint, refusing to jump to conclusions, confessing and re-examining our prejudices, and getting over our defensiveness. Thus the reason will be informed by the loves of the reasoner, and distorted by the corruption of his loves. The ideological taint is the distortion of reason through a deficiency in the courage and valuations of the person. James Luther Adams has put the matter poetically and concisely:

A second important doctrine concerning reason concerns the use of symbols in grasping abstract aspects of meaning. The topic of symbolism is a large one, and the relation of reason and language has complexities which need not detain us here. But it is necessary to analyse the abstracting process, for it is here that much of the trouble lies in the traditional conception of reason.

In Whitehead’s doctrine all realities from God to atoms have abstract aspects, but they are more than abstractions. Actuality exhibits the creative movement of entities which synthesize past concreteness and future possibilities in new events of realization. Abstract patterns are exhibited in all events. If this were not so there would be no rational intelligibility. The primordial nature of God is the abstract order of all possibilities and values. But God is not abstract order alone. He is concrete personal activity. Every creature participates in the formal structure of things, but no creature is only a form.

Clearly reason must deal with the abstract aspects of things as it seeks comprehension of relations and structures. To reason is to try to see what things are and how they go together, and this means that nothing can be experienced in its full concreteness by intellect alone. If I try to understand the beauty and meaning of Webern’s music, I cannot succeed merely by listening to it over and over. Understanding requires reflection upon what I have heard, and that means attention to structural aspects of what is there. That means to derive abstractions from the full concreteness. To be sure, I experience the aesthetic concreteness as I reason about it, and reason itself can show that the abstract patterns are less than the full reality.

Whitehead’s view of reason thus inverts the platonic tradition. Plato saw that reason seeks pure structure, abstracted from the flux of things; but Plato identifies that pure structure with being itself. Consequently, for Plato, reason gets nearer the truth the further it gets from time, change, and passage. But Whitehead denies that the structure itself is pure being; the structure is the abstract aspect of pure being. Real being is concrete feeling-events.

This doctrine that the structures which reason abstracts are set in the concreteness of process is a discovery which reasoning has helped to make, and to which modern science and philosophy have contributed. The movement of modern thought has been toward recognition of the tentativeness of all formulations of reason, and the incompleteness and revisability of all scientific theory. The equating of reality with rationally intelligible pattern can, of course, still be done but it goes against the evidence. We conclude then that one common criticism of intellectuality is based on a misunderstanding. This is the criticism that the intellect ‘abstracts’ from reality and therefore falsifies it. Certainly the intellect abstracts, that is its business. The error lies not in abstracting, but in mistaking the abstractions for the concreteness of reality.

The implication of this discussion for the meaning of love is clear. When the intellect motivated by love seeks concrete knowledge and relationship to the other, this does not exclude abstraction, but it holds abstractions in the service of love and sees them in relation to the reality in which they are embedded.¹⁸

A further consequence of these first two characterizations of reason is that reason does its proper work not when it is self-assertive and domineering, but when it submits its judgments to the continuing revision of experience, and the continuing criticism of further reflection. True rationality recognizes its limits. Reason achieves dependable knowledge of the structure of things when it is held subordinate to the view that the structure is not the whole reality but an abstracted aspect of reality. We recognize through the work of reason that there is nothing, not even the pure structures of logic, which can be fully understood through reason alone.

Godel’s theorem seems to have at least this consequence for all attempts to complete the rational foundations of logic.¹⁹ If this be true for the abstract and formal structures of logic, then it is clearly true for the understanding of the richness and complexity of concrete experience.

There is a further implication. Reason is likely to be most competent when the reasoner is most deeply aware of his bias and his temptation to rationalization. The discovery of bias is both a personal and a rational discovery and its confession is one of the marks of a disciplined intellect.

These assertions about the nature and function of reason do not rest upon purely rational discoveries. Neither are they the discoveries of pure love. Most of them have been forced upon us by tragic experience, the stubborn insistence of facts, and the determination of inquirers to look at the facts. They have come in part through the freeing of the mind from institutional dogmatisms, so that the depths and antinomies of reason can be explored, and we discover in how many different ways we can think about the world when the mind is free. As Henry Nelson Wieman has continually insisted, it is the work of God and not of men which opens up new possibilities, reveals new structures, and discloses riches of reality beyond our present knowledge.²⁰ This discovery of the place of reason in personal existence means a new situation in man’s search for knowledge of himself, and for the meaning of love in human experience. A new assessment of the nature of personal knowledge is possible as we come to the relation of loving and knowing.

(3) LOVING AND KNOWING

Whatever opens the person to the richness of the world beyond himself, whatever encourages the mind to give itself to the search for what is there to be known, whatever releases the person from defensiveness about his present structure of thought, and whatever overcomes distraction and triviality in the search for truth, contributes to the work of reason. And here surely we are not far from a definition of love. It will be recalled that the categorial analysis of love stresses the freedom to enter into relation with the other, and to set the other free to be himself. Love means willingness to participate in the being of the other at the cost of suffering, and with the expectation of mutual enrichment, criticism and growth. Love gives to the search for knowledge the indispensable personal context and spirit in which reason can work successfully and bring knowledge into the service of the fulfilment of personal being. Reason needs the spirit and impetus of love to realize itself and to become the servant of the Kingdom of God.

Whatever gives the person a motive for searching, for continuing the struggle for knowledge, for enduring the pain of creativity in the realm of ideas will be a service to reason. It is love, human and divine, which is the source of valuation. It is love which restrains present desire in the service of ultimate realization and the will to serve the other in his need. The ills of intellectuality, I am arguing, are not traceable to the function of conceptualizing in itself. That function is as natural, necessary, and constructive as any other human function. The ills of the intellect are in its triviality, its detachment from vital concern, the obfuscation of reality behind the symbols and the concepts, and its turning away from significant issues to meaningless dispute. And they are also in fanaticism, the refusal to yield a point in the face of evidence, the deification of the system against the reality, the rationalizations of idolatry. But these all have their roots in the self — not in intellect alone.

Disorder in the self and its loves is reflected in the disorder in reason. That disorder may take many forms, and it may not be apparent in much of the work of reason what sort of personal life it reflects. But the life of mind is not detached from the self and its loves, and it needs the power of ordered love.

We must not overstate the case here. Like other parts of man’s natural equipment, intellectuality is unpredictable in its appearance, and often eccentric in its expression. The best reasoners are rarely models of integrated personality. Often intellectual brilliance seems to involve considerable personal struggle and even disorder. Like artistic creativity, it may feed on the sensitivity derived from suffering, and whatever love is present may appear more chaotic than orderly. Love does not depend upon the full integration of the personality. Since love is learned in part through suffering, there are those who are torn by inward struggle or crushed by the weight of concern for others who know the hunger for love and its compassion more deeply than some well balanced and conventionally reasonable souls.

Our argument so far is that reason has its fulfilment when it is set within a non-defensive search for truth. The self learns that it can have the truth only through being open to self-corruption, and allowing the object of knowledge to ‘be itself’. The reasoning person wants to grasp reality. The mind wants to understand, to see, and to order its knowledge. It may even desire to achieve ‘the world as Idea’, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase. But the description of this as the imperious will to dominate misses the essential character of successful mind. The claim to absolute possession of truth, to reduce the world to idea and pure form, obscures the mind’s real destiny. It is the essence of rationality that mind respects the givens of experience, and does not permit the self to dictate reason’s results for the self’s gratification. To take the results of reason’s distortion through sin, and to identify this with the nature of reason, is an error similar to identifying the essence of man with his distorted loves.

It may be said that the qualities of respect for the object and willingness to undergo self-correction are not the same thing as love, so that we have yet to establish a relationship between love and reason. It would certainly be too much to claim that these qualities are identical with love. But they are inseparable from it. They are among the qualities which we have found in the categorial structure of love. We can put the matter this way: the elements which contribute to the successful functioning of reason are those which are nourished by the growth of the power to love. We are dealing, of course, with the growth of the person, and with love’s ultimate contribution to reason. The significance of the context in which man reasons is never disclosed all at once.

Our general characterization of reason has been based upon the function of reason in science, in common sense, and in any systematic reflection which involves concepts and symbols. We have so far made no special appeal to the function of reason in knowledge of other persons. This has been deliberate. There is a considerable body of theological and religious thought which has sought to establish the uniqueness of personal knowledge in the I-Thou relationship, and which treats this kind of knowledge as if it obeyed a quite different set of rules from the knowledge of objects. Those who hold this view usually see the relation of reason and love exclusively in the special realm of knowledge of persons.

I believe this doctrine of the ‘I-Thou’ school to be a misleading exaggeration of a truth. It distorts the way we come to know other persons. In the categoreal analysis of love we have shown that knowledge of other persons involves the capacity to see the other objectively, and that means to recognize the structured relationships in which the person lives. Reason is not set aside in the knowledge of the loved person. It is released, motivated and disciplined to become a more objective, courageous and creative reason. It should not lose its concern with clear concepts derived from the objective order of things, but it needs to bring this into the service of the personal relationship. It recognizes structures of thought for the abstractions they are. It does not allow the other person to become only an object or a type; but it continues to seek that costly objectivity which requires transformation of the self for the sake of the relationship to the other in the truth.

The so-called ‘I-Thou’ knowledge is therefore not absolutely different from ‘I-It’ knowledge. Both have their place in the process of knowing other persons, and both are necessary to serve the purpose of love, that is the opening of the way to communion. It is curious how the analysts of the I-Thou experience forget how much of human growth in mutual understanding comes not from attention solely to the other, but from sharing a mutual quest for objective knowledge or participation in a common interest. A friendship which was nothing but an I-Thou confrontation could be a very dull affair.²¹

Yet with this necessary qualification we can still agree with the personalism of the dialogical philosophy that there is something in knowledge of other persons which differs from other knowledge, and that in this knowledge love plays a special role.

Notice first, that all the requirements which have been stressed for any kind of knowledge are present and heightened in knowing other persons. There is the requirement of openness to the other’s being in his freedom, and the refusal to dominate or control the other to satisfy some preconceived plan in our own imagination. There is the requirement of the break with self-centredness which is a precondition of a genuine knowledge of the other.

Love for another person opens the way to a kind of knowledge which can never be given without it. This is true because love becomes a new discernment of the other in which there occurs insight and communication otherwise lacking. The familiar saying, ‘love is blind’, is a half truth stressing one side of love’s knowledge. But it really means, or ought to mean, that love sees more clearly. Love is light, insight, and understanding. It reaches the other’s being and yields an awareness otherwise impossible.

It is equally important that to love another is to discover oneself. The experience of teaching offers continued confirmation of this. The student who discovers that he loves mathematics, abstract painting, or the study of history discovers something about himself. He domes to know who he is through the loves which grow within him.

Certainly the emotions of hatred, dislike, and offence may also contribute to self-discovery. Personal growth involves every kind of experience. But love is not one emotion among others. It is the whole person’s growth in power to enter into community. It is his will to belong. Without love any emotion becomes self-destructive, and leads the intellect to a dead end. Love does not solve every problem; but without growth in love and in the capacity to receive love, the kind of knowledge of the world and of other persons which requires objectivity, dependability, and insight does not come. The evidence for the contribution of love to understanding from the realms of psychotherapy, education, aesthetic creativity, and the social sciences is overwhelming and need not be detailed here. Martin Buber is quite right that it is a sign of sin when we make other persons into objects to be used, and use reason to turn personal reality into impersonal structures which we absolutize as the truth. Without love the mind becomes the weapon of sophisticated violence. The love of wisdom becomes self-serving pride. Tradition becomes frozen dogma and descends into triviality and dishonesty. Scientific research into human problems becomes a wasteland of abstractions which never reach the human, or science may serve a demonic and inhuman evil as in the Nazi medical experiments. The intellect can serve love only when it is given its power and direction by love, This truth rests on no theological special-pleading, but on the evidence of human experience.

Much is rightly made in some philosophies of knowledge of the role of dramatic imagination in presenting the truth which relates subject to subject. It is entirely in accord with the theory of reason here presented to stress the creative synthesis of imaginative vision as the supreme way in which understanding of personal existence can be expressed. It is significant that two of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century who approached the problem of knowledge from very different perspectives, Heidegger and Whitehead, both came to the conclusion that it is in poetry rather than in the formal concepts of philosophy that the truth of existence is ultimately articulated. Heidegger sees the philosopher in his search for being arriving at the point where he must stand and wait for the revelatory word to be spoken by the poet, a word which philosophy itself cannot wholly achieve.²² Whitehead gives the poets the highest place in recalling man to the concrete experience of nature and beauty, and in synthesizing the ultimate intuitions which become the fruitful sources of rational reflection.²³ This point bears upon humanity’s present need. Lillian Smith, who expressed so profoundly the case for human communion against racial separation said in one of her last public addresses:

And it is the poets’ job to show us. For only the poet can look beyond the details at the total picture; only the poet can feel the courage beyond fear. It is his job to think in spans of 10,000 years; his job to feel the slow, slow movement of the human spirit evolving; to see that the moment is close for mankind to make another big leap forward.²⁴

We now take a further step into the meaning of love for reason, because we are concerned with the love of God and the knowledge of his love which transcends while it fulfils all human loves. Can agape be known by reason?

(4) FAITH, KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE

We have now to consider the view that the love of which the Gospel speaks transcends all human understanding. That faith goes deeper than reason is one of the persistent themes of Christian theology. It is rooted in the biblical affirmation that the truth disclosed in God’s self-revelation is not attainable by human reflection. The wisdom of God made known in the cross sets at naught the wisdom of this world (I Corinthians 1:18-25).

This appeal to a knowledge which is accessible only to faith seems confirmed by Christian experience. Untutored minds uncomplicated by intellectual analysis surely grasp the meaning of the love which is patient and kind, and endures in all things. Certainly such knowledge does not appear only among those with highly reflective intellects. There is even a perennial suspicion that the work of intellectual analysis may draw the soul away from its clear perception of the saving truth which God offers to all. When the intellectual task of theology is carried to its most intense and complex expression we surely find that we are on the threshold of unfathomable mystery. The being of God, the cosmic creativity, the expression of the divine love in the trinitarian symbols, the wonder of the incarnation, the experience of dying and rising with Christ and being ingrafted into his body, the hope of eternal life, all this takes us beyond rational grasp and justification. Theological work appears to take on the character of confession rather than rationally intelligible discussion. We know that the language of theology includes symbols and modes of expression which are poetic rather than scientific. Faith seeks understanding, but something happens to the mode of understanding when it moves toward the ultimate matters in which the meaning of love is disclosed. Faith involves a re-orientation of the mind which cannot be accomplished by the mind’s own resources, but which requires the illumination of grace. Hence the canons of reason seem to be broken, or at least subjected to a higher requirement, in the Christian view. So runs a very powerful argument in the Christian tradition.

Whatever our conclusion about the relation of faith and reason, and there have been a variety of positions in theology, we need to recognize that along with the insistence on the limits of reason the search for as much rationality as we can get has usually been affirmed. Faith has an inner tendency to seek understanding precisely because God is the truth, and in Christ the Truth all things cohere. The theme of believing ‘because it is absurd’ associated (although perhaps not correctly) with the name of Tertullian, represents a position eccentric to the main line of Christian reflection through the centuries. Kierkegaard’s attack on ‘objective reason’ has reshaped much of the discussion of the problem in modern theology; but Kierkegaard uses a highly rational dialectic in opening the way for the ‘leap of faith’. The existentialist philosophies which follow him, while seeking the distinctive nature of personal knowledge, are usually not obscurantist or anti-rational.²⁵

It is noteworthy that much of Karl Barth’s theological system tries to correct the tendency toward a kind of irrationalism which was present in his Commentary on Romans, so strongly influenced by Kierkegaard. Barth, we recall, has written explicitly about the dangers of irrationalism. And Emil Brunner, who wrestled courageously with the issue of faith and reason in all his theological pilgrimage, says that ‘faith itself is truly rational thought about God and about life as a whole’.²⁶

When we raise this question of the place of the intellect in the life of the spirit and our knowledge of God, we are at the heart of a critical issue for our scientific culture. It is an issue which has a special bearing upon the vocation of the intellectual in the Christian church. It would be absurd to propose at the end of this study of the meaning of love that this perennial discussion of faith and understanding can be neatly settled, but we can show that reflection on the forms of love in Christian history opens up some new aspects of the life of the mind. If love is the key to life, then it ought to guide us toward a right appraisal of the work of intellect. I propose that we have at hand one important clue in the search for a fruitful tension between love and intellect and their ultimate reconciliation. The clue is this: just as we have seen love ‘take form in history’, so also reason ‘takes form in history’. The relations of faith, love, and reason have been shaped by a series of historical circumstances in Christian history which cry out for reassessment in our century.

There are three main aspects of this history which concern us:

First, there is the use of reason in the formation of Christian dogma in the first centuries of the church’s life when the concept of reason was determined by Greek and Hellenistic philosophy. Second, the early development of the view that not only the truth of the Gospel as the saving word of God, but also the dogmatic formulae in which this truth was expressed were divinely and infallibly given. Third, the shaping of the biblical witness and original structure of Christian theology within a prescientific world-view, and without the methods of inquiry which the development of science and modern philosophy have made possible. In what follows I am not arguing that our insight or knowledge is superior to that of earlier centuries, or that we should disparage what the fathers of the church achieved in the formulation of Christian doctrine. But I believe that the terms upon which the relations of faith and reason were once stated are outmoded, and should no longer define our analysis of the problem or determine our methods of stating the truth we know in Jesus Christ.

Our first point is that the formulation of the relation of faith and reason was historically shaped by the fact that it was Greek reason which the biblical message first encountered. It was Neo-Platonic philosophy, and to an important extent Stoic philosophy, which offered the terms on which the intelligibility of faith was sought. Some theologians like Adolph Harnack regarded the development of the dogmas of the church under these influences as beclouding the Gospel message for centuries.²⁷ Others, and they represent the larger group in Christian theology, see the development as the natural fulfilment of the expression of the Gospel message in terms which could meet the questions and criticism of philosophy in that time and maintain the essential truth of the Gospel.²⁸ A third view has been growing in the modern period. It is that the synthesis of the biblical message and Greek philosophy was a viable and necessary result in the first centuries, that its consequences should be regarded neither as disastrous nor as the achievement of pure and final solutions, but rather as ambiguous and not beyond criticism. For example, the dogma of the incarnation, the two natures in the one person is a formula which preserved the essential Christian witness to the meaning of the incarnation, but with the use of categories of ‘nature’ and ‘person’ as defined within the philosophies of the first centuries, and which leave us with the necessity of re-examining the meaning of nature, of person, and of the action of God in the incarnation.

The important insight to come out of this new perspective on theology in the first centuries is that the meaning of ‘reason’ in the Christian tradition received a certain stamp in what happened in the first five centuries of the church’s life. Modern theology and modern philosophy are still struggling to get free from that neo-Platonic view of reason which, with all its profundity, leaves us with critical perplexities in a scientific age. Greek platonism, and one strand of Greek religious aspiration, sought to mount through rational structures to ‘being-itself’ as the ground of all things and all truth. Pure reason was identified with an absolutely transcendent reality above all the limitations of finite structure, time, becoming, and suffering. As reason soared into this unconditioned realm, it displayed its truth in the form of eternal principles which were identified with the particular scientific concepts and world view of the culture. The culmination of this process is not in St. Augustine, who was not especially interested in science, but in St. Thomas who took Aristotle’s philosophy with its scientific doctrines about the nature of the physical, biological, and psychological orders, and brought them into a systematic relationship with Christian theology.

St. Thomas has less confidence than Augustine in the power of reason to reach directly into the being of God. Certainly reason points toward its divine origin. The arguments for God’s existence are arguments which begin with experience and lead the mind to recognize the ultimate source and cause of all things, but St. Thomas significantly rejects the ontological argument. Only in eternal life can the mind directly know the truth of God’s being. Hence faith for St. Thomas tends to become more identified with belief in revealed propositions than with the personal orientation of the self responding to God in love. Under the inspiration of Aristotle, St. Thomas tries not only to make theology the queen of sciences but also to bring all knowledge within the scope of a monumental dogmatic structure. We do not disparage the great synthesizers when we suggest that the problems they dealt with, while still our problems, must now be defined in the perspectives of a scientific age and its methods of knowing. Augustine seems closer to modern personalism because he thinks of the intellect as doing its proper work only when it is inspired and ordered by love.

A further aspect of the traditional synthesis is clearly seen in St. Thomas. This was the rationalizing of dogma, which reinforced the tendency just mentioned toward intellectualizing the meaning of faith. Ecclesiastical tradition from the beginning tended to equate faith with belief in certain propositions about God. St. Thomas defines faith as believing with assent. ‘To believe is an act of the intellect, in so far as the will moves it to assent.²⁹ This uniting of faith with acceptance of truths in propositional form is the result of a long process. Ernst Troeltsch traced its origins in the first and second centuries not to the influence of Greek intellectualism, but to the need of the ecclesiastical community to preserve the authority of the church and the teaching function of the ministry.³⁰

The elaborated structure of dogma became a rationalization of the claims of the church to the possession of grace, and to the interpretation of salvation as merited by the good works of men in response to God’s prevenient grace. Luther’s violent language against ‘Reason’ must be understood in this context. He saw speculative reason as defence of the theology of merit and good works:

Luther goes on to declare that this pestilent beast, this harlot, should be ‘killed by faith’.³¹

Of course there is a counter point in Luther to such extreme language about reason. He also regards reason as a gift of God which must be used for understanding his Word, and for the guidance of life.³² Later Lutheran orthodoxy became more rationalistic than Luther had been, and produced a scholasticism of its own in which concern for ‘purity of doctrine’ emerged as the Protestant counterpart to the Catholic absolutism about dogma, the absolutism which reaches its limit and its absurdity in the dogma of infallibility.

It is interesting to see how the dogma of infallibility can be held so as to allow for freedom of reflection in the interpretation of faith. Cardinal Bea pointed out in the discussion of the Vatican Council that while the dogmas are not reformable their interpretations are. Even though they contain infallible truth the forms of dogma must be understood in relation to the historical circumstances in which they were promulgated.³³

Our analysis shows that understanding of the relation of faith and love to reason has been conditioned by historical circumstances. In a creative history where God opens up new possibilities of understanding it is an error to confine the meaning of reason to the historical forms of certain cultural presuppositions and values. Reason is the creative function of men’s self-understanding in response to God’s action. It cannot be identified with a particular set of conclusions, or a particular type of method. This view of reason suggests that when reason’s limitations are recognized and it is held within the context of humble, repentant and loving search for the truth, it may serve the knowledge of love, even the love of God, without pretending to encompass the love it is seeking to know.

We recognize two limitations on reason which keep it subordinate to human loves and to the love of God. The first is that love is concrete action arising from personal devotion and concern, while reason is always an abstracting and guiding function, seeking the structured aspect of things and the relation of symbols to a reality which is more than symbol. Reason comes always ‘after the fact’ as reflection on what is given, however far in imagination it may anticipate new meanings in the facts. Thus reason depends always upon the creative presence and power of love to do its proper work.

Love is known within the creative mystery of life in which God works with inexhaustible spontaneity and freedom. The Logos of being is its meaningful order made known through the action of God. No objective exhibition of the elements of the structure of being exhausts its reality. What being is can only be experienced, felt, lived as we reflect upon it with our blurred vision and in our finitude. Reason is not a transcendant function which tells us about a reality entirely apart from our experience. It is a reflection and construction drawn out of experience and the life of the spirit as we seek communion with the source of our being.

As reason cannot produce the concreteness of being, or the love which works in that concreteness, so it cannot achieve the final definition of the obligations of love toward the other. These have to be discovered in love itself. We come here to the critical point of the meaning of agape as redemptive action. All love does more than any rational formula can prescribe. The gracious spirit of agape does not stop at purely rational boundaries. Yet we must state the position here with care, for reason does recognize elements of obligation and of consideration, and these should not be ignored or despised. A rational view of life has always led to some acceptance of obligation toward the other. Principles of equality, freedom, and justice can be derived from rational reflection on the nature of man, and they lead to the recognition of universal principles of order and balance among conflicting claims. A rational element is indispensable to any society which would avoid arbitrary authority and tyranny.

At the same time, we can recognize that the definition of human good and moral obligation is always more than a function of reason. It is men who reflect on justice, and the content of their reflections always contains more of their self-centredness and their love than the pure dictates of reason can encompass. Plato’s vision of the just state has haunted and challenged, but also confused western ethics, because his pure ideal of justice seems bound up with a set of presuppositions about man and his nature. The ‘rational’ state is conceived as the completely rationalized state, whereas a truly reasonable order of life allows a large margin for freedom, spontaneity and that preliminary disorder out of which creativity can come.³⁴

Perhaps F. J. E. Woodbridge is right when he says that Plato himself does not believe in the ideal state, and that in The Republic he demonstrates through the Socratic irony the limitations of all visions of ideal political order. If so, Plato too belonged to the company of those who say that rational definitions of the good and the right must be tested in history, and that wisdom in ethical judgments does not arise from pure reason alone, but from the spirit and its loves with all their deformity and greatness.³⁵

This transcendence of agape over rational obligation has its analogue in the human loves. The view that human love as the search for mutuality always calculates the adequacy of the response of the other before giving of itself contradicts ordinary experience. Even forgiveness, humanly speaking, may be the reasonable action. ‘Everyone has faults’; ‘a man deserves another chance’. There are new possibilities which only forgiveness of the past can release. Edmond Cahn has given a superbly clear analysis of this rational avenue to forgiveness in his The Predicament of Democratic Man. A totally unforgiving person would be judged certainly irrational, if not insane.³⁶

Yet the human loves meet frustrations and failures in the search for communion which leaves us asking whether any rational claim is left. We cannot decide our mutual obligations on the basis of rational justice alone. The spirit which forgives seventy times seven, which can accept any consequences for the sake of love, is justified only by a reason which is informed by love and therefore runs ahead of our purely intellectual comprehension. Reason does not create the spirit of love which most deeply informs it, but it can offer to love one dimension of responsibility toward the other. It can search for understanding of what really binds human life together. For example, in forgiveness we must ask what the other really needs, and what new situation is created by the act of forgiveness. Without this, forgiveness may degenerate into destructive sentimentality. Yet forgiveness cannot ever wait for full knowledge of its consequences.

We come to the final service of reason to human loves. Reason has its special vocation within the life of faith. We can love God with our minds. The intellectual love of God is possible because God’s being is reflected in the finite forms which guide the search for truth. The integrity, courage, cleanness, and creative power of the intellect are resources for purging human loves of their sentimentalities and demonries. The present fashion of setting the intellect’s power of objectivity in opposition to the understanding of faith is a sickness of our culture and of theology. We need to recover the reality of the intellect’s integrity as an acknowledgement of responsibility toward God and toward man.

It is true that these qualities belong to the dignity of man and may be present without his acknowledgement of dependence upon God. Yet they suggest the movement of the mind toward God as the ultimate source of the unity of truth, the judge of all finite systems, and the fulfilment of the mind’s search for what is real. To love God with the mind may be thought of as the culmination of the search for truth, the celebration of the knowledge God makes possible. Or it may be seen as the impulse of the spirit within the movement of tie mind toward God. The intellectual virtues, like the other virtues, have their inner direction toward fulfilment in communion of life with life and mind with mind. Hence, to love God with the mind can infuse the spirit with hopefulness that sanity is possible, and that there is a truth which binds men together. It also can reflect the sense of dependence upon God and upon the community of human seekers which creates its own comradeship as we move deeper into the mystery.

We have seen that love is not only the impulse toward communion but the enjoyment of it. The intellect can delight in its powers and enjoy its reflection upon God. The so-called dryness of rational argument is often but the outward form or the tedious betrayal of what is really the riot of the mind’s play with deity. To love God is to rejoice in the richness of truth, to enjoy the counterpoint of the absurd and the nonsensical, to engage in the conflict of ideas and the history of human argument. If science is a form of human joy, as a recent interpretation has beautifully described it, so also is thought of God a mode of human delight and a source of joy, whether it comes under the usually sober auspices of theology, or the expressiveness of poetry, or the plain delight of minds finding their way to one another through mutual reflection on the inexhaustible theme of the being of God.

Certainly the intellectual love of God is subject to the corruption of sin and self-centredness, just as are all the other loves, whether religious or secular. But the search for the vision of God, the eros for truth, is one manifestation of that will to belong which, we have seen, is the image of God in man. We need intellectuality informed by love. Knowledge is not love, but knowledge which serves the communion of spirit with spirit, and which recognizes our human limitations in that search, comes into the service of love. The real adventures of ideas, to use Whitehead’s phrase, are those which lead spirit to share its discoveries with spirit. The truth makes us free, and freedom is an indispensable condition of love.

Man’s intellectual exploration of his world has given him power beyond the imagination of previous centuries; but that power will lead to self-destruction unless man can live in understanding with man. If in the vast universe there are other spiritual beings and intelligences to be known, the impetus to discover them and be discovered is surely not for curiosity’s sake alone, but the craving of mind seeking mind and spirit seeking spirit.

The search for communion makes the adventure of the mind worth its cost. The sane mind is not in love with itself, but with God and his world, and with every other mind which seeks to know. The intellect itself can put on the form of the servant in this strange history of man’s search for loving communion with God and his fellows.

NOTES:

1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1 Sec. 1, 3; Sec. 7, 2.

2. Edward F. Rothschild, The Meaning of Unintelligibility in Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934).

3. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1959; London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1961). Bertrand Russell, ‘A Free Man’s Worship’, in Mysticism and Logic (London: Allen & Unwin, 1917; New York: W. W. Norton, 1929).

4. George Orwell, 1984 (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1949; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949). B. F. Skinner, Walden II (New York: Macmillan, 1948).

5. John Wild, ‘Devotion and Fanaticism’, in Process and Divinity, edited by Reese and Freeman (Open Court: La Salle, Illinois, 1964).

6. Archibald Macleish, A Time to Speak (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1941).

7. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963; London: Jonathan Cape, 1964).

8. The phrase is taken of course from Andrew D. White’s classic The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology (New York: Appleton, 1914; London: Dover: Constable).

9. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, chapter 1.

10. Augustine, Serm. (de Script. Nov. Test) CXXVI, i, i, ii, 3. On Augustine’s anticipation of the ontological argument see De. lib. Arb. II, xv.

11. Augustine, Serm. (de Script. N. T.), LII, vi, 16.

12. C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

13. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

14. Cf. D. D. Williams, ‘Brunner and Barth on Philosophy’, The Journal of Religion, Vol. XX VII, No. 4, October 1947.

15. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1, pp. 116-18.

16. Supra, chapter 4.

17. The Protestant, October, 1943.

18. The difference between Whitehead’s view and Bergson’s is important here. Bergson holds that the intellect falsifies, but he never integrated this doctrine with his attempt to construct a metaphysics based on ‘new and fluid concepts’. Whitehead avoids Bergson’s dilemma of trying to conceive the inconceivable by affirming the primordial structure in God without denying the concrete process which exhibits the structure. See Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912; London: H. Jonas & Co.), and A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 319.

19. Cf. Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel’s Proof, in The World of Mathematics, ed. by James R. Newman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956, pp. 1668-95; London: Allen & Unwin, 1960. Godel’s Proof publ. sep. London, 1959, Routledge & Kegan Paul).

20. Henry Nelson Wieman, The Source of Human Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).

21. The classic statement of the dialogical philosophy is of course Martin Buber’s I and Thou, 2nd edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark). In my criticism lam agreeing with Ronald Hepburn in his Christianity and Paradox (London: Watts, 1958), chaps. 3-4, that the case for knowledge of God is weak if it is founded on unique claims to knowledge in the I-Thou relationship.

22. Martin Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics’ in Existence and Being, trans. by Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1949, pp. 391-2: London: Vision Press, 1959). Cf. the essays on Holderlin and poetry in the same volume.

23. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, pp. 291, 319, chapter xviii.

24. Lillian Smith, address to the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress, quoted in the New York Times, March 20, 1965, p. 44.

25. See Paul Tillich, ‘Existential Philosophy: Its Historical Meaning’ in Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).

26. Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, (1946), p. 429.

27. Adolph von Harnack, History of Dogma (Boston: Little Brown, 1901), Vol. IV, chap. 3, pp. 180, 223.

28. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. II, pp. 140-2. The Roman Catholic Leslie Dewart in his The Future of Belief (New York: Herder & Herder, 1966) takes a radically critical position against the ‘hellenizing’ of Christian doctrine, and makes a strong plea that the church recognize its dogmas are ‘underdeveloped’.

29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theo!ogica II-II Qu. 2, Art. 2; cf. I, Qu. 62, Art. 4.

30. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (New York: Macmillan, 1931, pp. 94-6, 179; London: Allen & Unwin, 1931).

31. Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, Dillenberger, ed., p. 128.

32. Cf. Brian Gerrish, Graceful Reason (Oxford University Press, 1962).

33. Augustin, Cardinal Bea, The Unity of Christians (London: Geoffrey Chapman. 1963), pp. 97-101; 116-18, 139.

34. William Ernest Hocking, Freedom of the Press (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 58, 99-104.

35. F. J. E. Woodbridge, The Son of Apollo (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929).

36. Edmond Cahn, The Predicament of Democratic Man (New York: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 150-4.