and Bill Wiegand,
a brilliant student from Idaho who was a year ahead of me,
let me use his notebook that he made the year before and I can
remember even tracing some of his drawings and copying much.
Learning the scientific method was a big part of seminary schooling
and we learned how to put forth an hypothesis and to try to
prove it mathematically, logically, and with experimentation.
The five intellectual virtues according to Aristotle are science,
art, intuitive reason, practical wisdom, and theoretical wisdom.
Our schooling was meant to teach us many kinds of knowledge
so that our intuitions could guide in science and help us
to find a fruitful hypothesis as Mendel and Copernicus did.
Intuitive reason and the scientific search that could grow out of it
aided us even in getting a kind of certitude in our faith, hope, and love.
Aristotle defined science as a certain knowledge of things through
causes and our liberal education helped us to intuit probabilities
so that with a practical wisdom we could integrate our lives
as a universal whole within the big picture seen by wisdom.
For Aristotle friendship was a unity of one soul in two bodies
based upon common values but once we saw Jesus’ agapeic love
for all, even enemies, we knew that we should be friendly to all.
I,3.9 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning with History
The monks nourished their agape artistically with music,
scientifically with the sciences, mathematically with intuitive reason,
and came to a practical wisdom that revealed their celibacy
as a sublimated eros that facilitated a new affection and friendship.
They nourished us in all of that historically, for we had art
and music appreciation courses in which we came to know
the history of art and music and we learned the history of ideas.
We studied the Hebrew Bible in the nine stages of its history.
All the fathers had majored in philosophy before they
studied four years of theology and then studied their specialties.
Just at the time that I went to the seminary around 1950
Scripture study went through a revolutionary change in the Catholic
world, for the higher biblical criticism was making an impact.
Father Mathias was back from Rome and teaching us after getting
his Doctorate of Sacred Scripture and William Foxwell Albright’s
“From Stone Age to Christianity” was being read by Catholics.
We saw how the Law and the prophets with their loves of
Ahava and hesed prepared the way for the new agape of Jesus.
We were beginning to understand the history of the various
spiritualities, from the Benedictine to the Franciscan and
Dominican to the Jesuit and the Carmelite; we started
to understand the history of modernity, from Luther and
Descartes to Calvin and Hobbes to Henry VIII and Locke
to Spinoza and Leibniz to Berkeley, Adam Smith,
Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Marx; and all of this at bottom was
a history of agape, which gave us confidence even as high
school students that all things work together unto the good.
The monks, who knew this history so well because much of it
was their own Benedictine history, gave us such a positive
attitude that we could successfully mourn any loss that came our way.
II. With Levinas and Derrida
II,1 Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy
II,1.1 Levinas Grew up with the Jewish Religious Ethics
Emmanuel Levinas tells us that the Hebrew Bible directed his
thinking from the time of his earliest childhood in Lithuania.
He was born in 1905, and entered the University of Strasbourg in 1923.
Besides studying philosophy and learning its history in the West and
besides learning the contemporary philosophy of Heidegger and Husserl,
he made a study of Talmudic sources under the guidance of a teacher
who communicated the traditional Jewish mode of exegesis.
Just as Maimonides came forth with a Jewish version of Aristotelian
philosophy in the thirteenth century and just as Spinoza gave us his
Jewish version of ethics in modern times, so Derrida and Levinas
give us their Jewish version of the postmodern approach to ethics.
From his perspective of Jewish responsibility Levinas reworked
the whole history of Western philosophy and Totality and Infinity,
which he published in 1961, gives the full view of the early Levinas.
My world is a totality and I try to control every aspect of it.
I might even explain it to myself and others with a philosophical theory
that gives an account of its beginning, its process, and its purpose.
Each person‘s religious worldview could let him or her order
everything in a totality that again makes sense of all the parts.
But, according to Levinas, the face of the other can call me out of
my
