Things That I Can Figure Out

There was this one time when I was in 12th grade. And it was awesome.

I want to start this story back in high school. I was a part of the International Baccalaureate Programme, known as IB for short (which is a good thing, because I only just learned how to spell baccalaureate). I described it, at the time when I discussed high school on a regular basis, as "AP on steroids." It meant taking advanced classes and ridiculous exams, and, since the programme had some cohesion, it also meant specific classes and outside assignments designed to help us integrate what we were learning in all of our classes into one grand and glorious bed of knowledge and critical thought.

One strategy to accomplish this end took the form of "Theory of Knowledge," a watered-down epistemology (apparently, as long as you can say that word, you aren't drunk. But that is an old story for another day) class, meant to answer the questions : Who are you? and How do you know what you know? We started off the class with a list of Ways of Knowing. The 4 Ways of Knowing are Reason, Perception/Senses, Emotion, and Language. Each week, we had to turn in an Out of Class (OC) writing assignment, discussing something in life that related to one of these ideas.

For one of my first OCs, I wrote a few pages about how these Ways of Knowing leave something out. I have knowledge of God, I argued, that I knew as firmly and unequivocally as I knew anything from Reason, Perception, Emotion, or Language. Yet my knowledge of God did not come directly from any of these forms of knowledge. Where did it come from? I proposed that there was a missing Way of Knowing, one that consisted of our capacity to know God.

A couple weeks ago, Father Dude started a series of seminars about the Catholic faith, meant to approach it from an intellectual angle. He started with a lecture on "The Rational Basis for Catholicism." In this lecture, Father explained that modern thinking placed faith and reason in a false dichotomy, relegating faith to the realm of emotion. This dichotomy resulted in a large way from the writings of Kant, although some other Enlightenment thinkers helped.

To place the world back in proper perspective, Father Dude read to us from Aquinas, whom I have never studied. Faith, he contended, is a rational capacity that allows us to know God. We have knowledge (in part) through rationality. Rationality can be subdivided into two categories: reason and faith. Reason gives us knowledge of the created order. Faith gives us knowledge of the Creator. It is the capacity through which we understand revelation.

When I heard these ideas, I got so excited. I had said the same thing! This new, wild idea that Father was proposing to us made perfect sense -- made such perfect sense that I had known it, confusedly and indistinctly, as a 17 year-old, engaged in her academics and alive in her faith. It demonstrated one of the many and most convincing reasons that I am Catholic: It makes sense. It is consistent with what I know of the world and how I know the world.

Father Dude's lecture on faith and reason left me with the impression that he'd left something out, however. Remembering my IB days, I thought that some part of knowledge had been left out. After all, can't we have knowledge that is not purely rational?

Week Two rolled around. "Forms of Knowledge in the Catholic Faith." How else do we know things? In addition to Rationality (Faith and Reason) we know through Beauty and Love. Win once again, Catholic Church.