By DONALD DeMARCO
A physicist friend of mine told me that one of his students wanted to become a physicist but hated mathematics. My colleague laughed at contradiction. This odd separation of ends from their indispensable means is, however, not all that unusual. All my students, for example, want to be happy, but a rather small percentage of them are willing to accept the means necessary to attain that desirable end.
Here is one of the great paradoxes of life: The concrete stands on the shoulders of the abstract. Therefore, it is so easy for students to separate them from each other, the former being evident and tangible, while the latter remains hidden and intangible.
Nonetheless, as reason tells us, an unseen God created the visible world. Can we deny the Creator His existence?
This separation of ends from their means can be associated with a similar separation of action from thought. It is all too common for people, seeing little value in philosophy, to deplore certain actions while remaining indifferent to the very thoughts upon which they rely. This is a most serious problem since philosophy gives us the enlightenment we need in order to prevent the emergence of deplorable actions. Philosophy, though intangible, is extremely practical when it is properly applied.
I am utterly fascinated, therefore, by how people can protest against certain actions without protesting against the very ideas that contribute directly to those actions.
The example of Dietrich von Hildebrand and his wife, Alice, well illustrates the point. Dietrich had both the intelligence and the courage to speak out against Hitler and Nazism. His strong and well-circulated objections earned him the distinction of being the number one enemy of the Third Reich. A warrant was issued for his assassination.
Through the assistance of many friends, he fled to Austria, then to France, to Portugal, to Brazil, and finally to the United States where he began a teaching career in the philosophy department at Fordham University.
According to his wife, “My husband’s ardent love for truth is what allowed him to perceive the poison of the Nazi philosophy so quickly. When truth was violated, it registered clearly to someone who had such an appreciation for it.”
Von Hildebrand’s philosophy is essentially anti-Nazi. Moreover, the root of his philosophy lies in the fundamental value of truth. In a chapter entitled “The Dethronement of Truth,” in his book, The Tower of Babel (1953), he refers to the Bavarian minister of education, a certain Hans Schemm, who made the following astonishing statement before an assembly of university professors:
“From this day on, you will no longer have to examine whether something is true or not, but exclusively whether or not it corresponds to the Nazi ideology.”
In this way, no one has any basis from which he can denounce Nazism. An ideology without a justifying philosophy is something that any intelligent person should reject. It is truth that determines whether a position is right or wrong, and certainly not the biased sentiments of the Nordic race. Dethrone truth and war becomes inevitable.
Von Hildebrand records his courageous stand in his book, My Battle Against Hitler: Faith, Truth and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich.
Von Hildebrand’s wife, Alice, brought her husband’s anti-Nazi philosophy to Hunter College, where she taught philosophy for 37 years. In her autobiography, Memoirs of a Happy Failure (2014), she recounts how she was persecuted for disagreeing with the dominant school of relativism. Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon attests: “Her love of truth shines forth on every page of this fascinating personal Memoir.”
But her commitment to truth was her greatest obstacle. In fact, she was told by her school administrators not to teach objective truth. It took 15 years for Hunter College just to give Alice her own desk.
“Someone — God — wanted me there,” she writes. “After 13 years I was granted tenure,” she recalls, by a 9 to 8 vote, passing an unprecedented Gestapo-like interview of two hours by 15 heads of departments and two deans. She and others as well regarded her being awarded tenure as a “miracle.”
Not everyone shared this view, however. Astonishingly, even rabbis, several of them in fact, protested against her being granted tenure. “In secular universities,” as Alice observes, “the word ‘objective truth’ triggers panic.”
How can it be that Nazism is universally denounced, while the very ideas that spawned it not only remain free from criticism but those who bring it to light are censured? Relativism produces an atmosphere in which ideologies like Nazism thrive. The answer may be complex, but surely one of the key factors is a separation of thought from action, means from ends, cause from effect, or philosophy from life.
Alice von Hildebrand, like her distinguished husband, was a philosopher. For this she paid the price. But she also reaped the harvest, particularly in the joy of knowing that her teaching inspired and guided many of her students into the Catholic Church.
In 2013, Pope Francis formally recognized her as a Dame Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of St. Gregory in recognition of her lifetime work on behalf of the Church.
Alice von Hildebrand and her husband Dietrich devoted their lives to a philosophy that rested on three points: reverence, value, and God. When we have reverence for the natural values of life, including human life itself, we are moving in the direction of God who created all things that are good and thereby inscribed with value.
In her biography of her late husband, The Soul of a Lion (2000), which resonates with their shared philosophy, including their mutual opposition to abortion, she records his final words: “A country that legalizes murder is doomed.” If abortion is the dethronement of truth, then we are surely doomed.
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