The Church is missionary by her very essence, because she exists, not principally as a human institution, but as an extension in time and space of the Incarnation of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. The economic missions of Christ and the Holy Spirit are, in turn, extensions of their processions from the Father in the inner life of the Trinity. To be a Christian, then, is to receive, in and through baptism, the extraordinary grace of participating in the life of the Trinity in this unique way, by sharing in Christ’s and the Spirit’s mission to recapitulate the whole of creation and renew it in the saving love of the Trinitarian God. All of the concrete activities we associate with missionary work — the proclamation of the Good News to all peoples unto the ends of the earth — ought to be understood on the basis of this ultimate theological mystery.
One of the often overlooked “missionary territories” to which the Church is sent is, as it were, the field of philosophy. One might argue that this field is of special significance today. We will reflect here on two reasons for this urgency. First, this field is a particularly important dimension of the New Evangelization. As Pope Benedict XVI explained in a homily in 2010, what is meant by this term is not just proposing the Gospel, which is the Church’s perennial mission, but now re-proposing it, specifically “to those regions where the roots of Christianity are deep but who have experienced a serious crisis of faith due to secularization.” In other words, especially among Western nations, the Church’s most urgent missionary task is generally not to proclaim the Gospel to those who have never heard it: after all, the Christian proclamation lay at the origins of Western culture and has in a sense entered into the very stones out of which the West was built. The more fundamental problem with the West is instead that it has heard the Gospel, and even been essentially formed by it, but lost the ardor of its first love, to use the words of Revelation. The faith that entered into the stones, so to speak, has been left there. The most urgent task is thus to rekindle the first love.
We wish to suggest that philosophy has a crucial role to play in this rekindling. To understand why this is the case, we need to reflect for a moment on what philosophy is. The great philosopher-pope, St. John Paul II, explained in the encyclical Fides et Ratio that philosophy, though it does indeed include timeless teachings about the nature of things, is not in the first place a body of knowledge. Instead, it is itself a love, in this case, a love of wisdom (philos-sophia). As the tradition has recognized — but, alas, professional philosophy departments have largely forgotten — the practice of philosophy, at its core, deepens a desire and fosters a need. This need-driven desire is not just one among the many desires that characterize humanity, desires that set us in motion both as individuals in the activities of our daily lives, and as peoples who organize existence and celebrate it in the activities and artifacts of culture. It lies, instead, at the very center of our humanity; it is the desire that defines us as human: “All men by nature desire to know,” as Aristotle said at the beginning of his Metaphysics. This desire for truth is in fact what makes all of our other desires, both individual and collective, properly human. Every desire, no matter how grand or how apparently trivial, can be understood as a desire for truth and wisdom in addition to its being the desire to accomplish or possess whatever particular good it seeks. Thus, for example, the properly human desire for food is a desire for the truth of a meal, and the wisdom of human community, with all of the beauty of ritual and the dignity of the created realities involved. We desire truth in everything we desire, and it is precisely this that makes us human.
In this sense, philosophy is essential to the Church’s mission above all in its form as the New Evangelization. To philosophize is not just to learn about the great philosophers, but to enter as deeply as we can into the questions that animated them, into the thinking they undertook — which is to say to cultivate the practice of philosophy. This cultivation has both a personal dimension and a cultural dimension. The Word of God is Spirit and Truth, but the seeds of this Truth may be said to fall on dry, or shallow, or thorn-infested ground if there is no capacity to receive it, if it does not encounter a welcoming soil in which it can take root and grow. A capacity to receive involves two things: on the one hand, a desire that we retrieve from the depths of our being by recognizing the genuine need we have for what is being offered; and, on the other hand, a properly intellectual dimension, which is to say some ability to grasp what the Word means and the precise way in which it is significant. Both aspects are essential to philosophy. To foreground philosophy in the Church’s missionary task is therefore to open both the heart and the understanding of the person (or better: to open the heart as understanding), above all by eliciting and educating the habitus of wonder that lies at the beginning of philosophy and never ceases to sustain it. It is not only the case that deepening wonder leads us to strive to learn so we may know; it is also the case that proper learning deepens our disposition to wonder. To return to the metaphor, cultivating philosophy would be likened to aerating the soil, loosening it so that it can receive, not only the seed, but at the same time water, and air, and sunlight, into its depths; the studying the tradition and appropriating its riches would be likened to enriching the soil, so that the seed has the nutrients available properly to grow and bear fruit.
There is also a properly cultural dimension of this cultivation. Our culture is made up, not only of the values inherited from the Church, but also practices and institutions. These ought to be understood as various claims regarding the ultimate meaning of things. For example, the structure of our economy and the way we organize work rest on a particular conception of what things are and what they are for, i.e., what good they strive to achieve: what is money, what is property, what is work, who and what is the human being who works, what is the purpose of this activity, and so forth. To cultivate philosophy in this cultural dimension thus means to continue to rethink things from their origin, to re-collect original meanings and purposes, not simply to take these forms for granted in a thoughtless and mechanical way, but to engage them contemplatively, to practice these forms as so many questions about ultimate meaning. If the hearts of individuals and of civilization as a whole are thus opened by philosophy, and indeed as philosophy, the evangelization will be genuinely new, it will be a renewed love of the truth, beauty, and goodness of what has been given. One can justly say that there is no rekindling of love of any kind that is not in some fundamental way philosophical.
This leads to the second reason the philosophical dimension of the Church’s mission is especially urgent today. In Fides et Ratio, John Paul II writes that “[o]ne of the most significant aspects of our current situation, it should be noted, is the ‘crisis of meaning’” (FR, 81). An awareness of this crisis can tend to be eclipsed by the more obvious problems that afflict the contemporary world, problems that are themselves quite serious and pressing: violence, hatred, persecution, starvation, homelessness, and so forth. But the crisis of meaning, if it is not always so immediately felt, is nevertheless arguably more profound than these others, which of course does not diminish their own particular importance. If the human being is defined by the need for truth, as the pope also says in this encyclical, this crisis is a crisis that touches our very humanity more than any other. It touches the heart of what it means to be human. The pope continues in this paragraph:
Perspectives on life and the world, often of a scientific temper, have so proliferated that we face an increasing fragmentation of knowledge. This makes the search for meaning difficult and often fruitless. Indeed, still more dramatically, in this maelstrom of data and facts in which we live and which seem to comprise the very fabric of life, many people wonder whether it still makes sense to ask about meaning. The array of theories which vie to give an answer, and the different ways of viewing and of interpreting the world and human life, serve only to aggravate this radical doubt, which can easily lead to scepticism, indifference or to various forms of nihilism.
In consequence, the human spirit is often invaded by a kind of ambiguous thinking which leads it to an ever deepening introversion, locked within the confines of its own immanence without reference of any kind to the transcendent. A philosophy which no longer asks the question of the meaning of life would be in grave danger of reducing reason to merely accessory functions, with no real passion for the search for truth.
A book by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke (and his co-author Christopher Mastropietro) appeared recently with the title Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (Story Grid, 2024). The book is a condensation, so to speak, of an extremely popular 50-part lecture series by Vervaeke with the same name. The book, which states that we all share a “hunger for meaning,” describes the crisis in terms reminiscent of Fides et Ratio, written more than a quarter-century earlier:
Suicide is spiking.… These “deaths of despair” cannot be easily sourced to natural conditions any more than depression can be reduced to chemical imbalances in the brain. Instead, many people are expressing an acute sense of having lost touch with reality. More and more often, in both individuals and groups, we encounter expressions of nihilism and cynicism as well as deep frustration and futility. We no longer trust in our public institutions. We have completely lost faith in our political and judicial systems. Religious affiliation is receding consistently, and participation in community organizations is in decline.… [R]eferences to “crisis” and “collapse” have … become constant factors in our discourse. All of these symptoms, which indicate that meaning is under threat, are now so pervasive that we take them for granted. Several decades ago, movies depicting apocalypse and collapse were considered radical science fiction. But now, these themes have become part of our cultural ambience. The modern world seems chaotic and impersonal, yet at the same time scarce, finite, even boring. When unforseen events in the world force us to keep company with ourselves, we find the same malaise in our interior lives. A vacuum opens beneath us, a grief for something lost. But we struggle to remember exactly what is lost, and this spiritual amnesia only intensifies the feeling of hopelessness. It becomes difficult to diagnose, let alone to treat, a problem that we cannot see or feel, precisely because it is behind how we see and feel. (7)
The reason for drawing attention to this book is that it indicates a double failure of the Church’s mission in the West. On the one hand, Vervaeke points to our “spiritual amnesia,” our “grief for something lost.” It ought to disturb us, as Catholics, that this crisis of meaning should afflict a culture that was ultimately born from the heart of the Church. The crisis indicates that the Good News, which we know to be essentially life-giving (cf., Jn 10:10), has been thwarted, dulled, or otherwise forgotten. On the other hand, Vervaeke explains that what prompted his project was his observation of “a growing confluence between people who were interested in Buddhism and people who were interested in cognitive science” (2). In fact, although he draws on the Greek philosophical tradition (especially Socrates and the Stoics), and he does not show any hostility toward Christianity, especially in its more traditional forms, Vervaeke appeals principally to Buddhist insights and practices as offering a way out of the crisis. This approach no doubt resonates with what many teachers have experienced: the most interesting and interested students, those who desire something more than the conventional culture seems to offer, are often drawn more to Eastern philosophies and religions than to the Christian tradition. This fact provokes in us, or ought to provoke in us, a collective examination of conscience: Why does the Church not speak more clearly to this desire for “something more”? Why is it not above all the Church who offers to satisfy — and, indeed, at the same time to deepen! — this widespread “hunger for meaning,” which finds itself so relentlessly frustrated in the contemporary world?
There are, to be sure, many and variegated responses to this question, and a full answer would involve all of them: history is crucial; there are theological and ecclesiological reasons; patterns of culture, socioeconomic conditions, technological forms, especially in the arena of social media, are all relevant. But surely a central dimension, and fundamental to all of these others, is philosophical. To enter into the heart of the world, and the heart of man — which is of course the proper aim of her mission — the Church must re-collect her traditional claim to philosophy. “In revealing the love of the Father, Jesus Christ reveals man to himself,” and, we might add, reveals the world to itself. The revelation of God in Christ is also a revelation of the ultimate meaning of things; this revelation bears on the immanent structures of all of the realities that constitute human existence: our language, our freedom, our embodiment, our sense of time and place, our interaction with nature, and with the goods of this world, our work and economic exchange, and so forth. These structures need to be penetrated by genuinely philosophical thought — penetrated and thereby opened up to the revelation of the ultimate meaning of things in Christ.
At the end of Fides et Ratio, John Paul II recalls a theme found in the Church Fathers, but rarely recognized among contemporary thinkers: philosophari in Maria. This theme has inexhaustible depths, and warrants our reflection and inquiry especially today. Mary is not just a model of philosophy, as one who “kept all these things and pondered on them in her heart” (Lk 2:19); she is at the same time what one might call a Realsymbol of philosophy: she is the very embodiment of one who loves wisdom, namely, the Wisdom, or the Word, of God; she is one who is, on our behalf, so radically and purely receptive to the Father in the Holy Spirit that this Wisdom takes flesh in her womb — which is to say the logos, or meaning itself, becomes a reality in her. In this regard, Mary is herself the Church’s mission as philosophy.
In this task of recalling the philosophical dimension of the Church’s mission, there is of course an immense treasure available to us, not only the classical tradition, stemming from the Greeks and transformatively assumed in the middle ages and modern periods, but also, as Fides et Ratio says, all of the world’s wisdom traditions, from East to West, and from North to South: The Church can boldly say, “humani nihil” — indeed, significativum nihil!—“a me alienum puto.” But among thinkers closer to us, there is no doubt none that has understood and exemplified the “philosophari in Maria” better and more profoundly than the German philosopher, Ferdinand Ulrich, and his students, most prominent among whom is Bishop Stefan Oster, whose 60th birthday we celebrate. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Bishop Oster for his having so faithfully promoted the work of Ulrich, and his having more generally embraced the specifically philosophical dimension of the Church’s mission, so urgent for our age.
