These are excellent questions and comments. I used to think more along your lines, until I read MacIntyre. Now I see that the way I used to think was more Enlightenment and Cartesian/Kantian/Lockean than Catholic and Thomistic.

Allow me to e-mail you an article I wrote on precisely these questions. Send me a note and I’ll send it: tjkozinski@gmail.com

For now, I’ll just say this:

The particular beliefs we hold to be true, as well as the ideas we consider indisputable, the facts we deem self-evident, the allegiances to which we are committed, the traditions we revere, the authorities we recognize, the customs we cherish, the attitudes we adopt, in short, the overall picture we embrace of God, man, and the world, although perhaps quite true in an absolute and universal objective sense, and perhaps known to be true by us, is, nevertheless, relative and particular in a subjective sense. Our beliefs, even though perhaps universally true beliefs, are still bound to a particular historical and cultural tradition in their genealogy, communicability, and intelligibility.

So, we do not discover the truth of our beliefs on our own as much as we inherit and receive them from and through others. We do not obtain knowledge autonomously, as mere individuals–on a deserted island–and in abstraction from that which is relative and particular in our lives, but in solidarity with others, as members of a community, and in virtue of our relative and particular histories and cultures, that is, our traditions. Contra the Enlightenment, there is no “view-from-nowhere” to which we can climb, no “tradition-independent” rationality we can exercise, no “universal reason” we can access to enable us fully to escape the relative and particular character of human knowledge.

Now, you might be thinking that this so-called “tradition-constituted rationality” sounds a lot like the theological, philosophical, and cultural relativism condemned unambiguously by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI. If we cannot know absolute truth in an absolute manner, what is the use of talking about truth anyway? But, to reiterate, it is not that human beings cannot recognize and possess absolute and universal truth about and God, the world, and man, but only that the mode or condition of such knowledge is ineluctably relative and particular, for we are historical and social, as well as rational and spiritual, beings. We are tradition-transcending in virtue of our spirit, yet we are tradition-bound in virtue of our body.

thank you for your note. i had read your article, though evidently not carefully enough to ascertain your exact position from the paragraph in question. i apologize for imputing to you a position you don’t hold.

i suppose i should just read macintyre’s “whose justice?” but i have a few questions about his framework you might be able to answer. these questions are followed by two comments.

1. QUESTION: i am by nature drawn to arkes’ and aquinas’ and maritain’s models because i have always (unquestioningly) conceived of reason as universal. i therefore don’t know how “rationality” could only be a “particular practice.” does macintyre distinguish between rationality and reason?

2. QUESTION: if there is no rationality as such but only rationality through moral communities, and if membership in communities is a condition for genuinely rational enquiry, what of the thought experiment involving a human being bearing the image of god who grows up alone on an island after having been abandoned by his parents? does he have his own rationality? his own tradition? his own moral community? is he capable of “genuinely rational enquiry?”

i posit that he would, through reason, be able to discern that 2+2=4, that anally violating the monkey is wrong, etc….

3. COMMENT: c. s. lewis argues somewhere that in the final analysis, all experiences of “i ought” are instances of divine revelation. i agree with lewis and second your position that theology must be welcomed to the table as an interlocutor, particularly since i believe all true thought ultimately involves an encounter with the divine logos.

4. COMMENT: abstract principles might well be fleshless, bloodless, and dead. but abstract principles might be true. it seems clear to me that there is only one good reason for believing any proposition — that it is true. indeed, the dead proposition that “all principles of reason are expressions of the divine logos” is dead but true….

I am using postmodern language deliberately to show its ultimate incoherence. It reduces all claims of truth to narrative and story except its own claims, while it marginalizes disproportionately the one story that claims to be more than a story, Christianity.

If you haven’t already, if you read the entire article, I think you will see that I am no euphemist.

reminds me of “life partners.”

Somewhere along the way, the notion developed that theology is an academic discipline, with all that entails. It’s not. It has always been a prayerful discernment of “words appropriate to God”.