By DONALD DeMARCO
Edward Ingram Watkin, better known simply as E. I. Watkin, an English convert to the Catholic Church, is a name that should not be lost to Catholics of today. When he passed away in 1981 at age 92, The Times of London described him as “one of the most distinguished Catholic philosophers of his day.”
His best-known work is The Catholic Centre, published in 1945. His motivation for writing it was “the passionate realization that the world is now the stage of a conflict between those who genuinely believe in a Divine creator and those who avowedly or implicitly deify man.”
The “Catholic center,” for Watkin, is where opposites are reconciled. “Catholicism,” he writes, “occupies the reconciling centre between extremes, containing what is positively true in them, rejecting what is one-sided and excessive.”
No ideology would have a chance of being accepted if it did not contain at least some grain of truth. Neither ideologies nor heresies are built on complete falsehoods, but on incomplete truths that happen to be, in one way or another, fashionable. Taking Watkin’s study as a model, I would like to present two fragments of comprehensive truth that are influential in today’s world and indicate how they can be brought, through the Catholic center, into harmony with each other. I refer to these two conflicting fragments as “materialistic” and “metaphysical.”
The philosophy of materialism is the assertion that matter is real and spirit is not. The pages of history are filled with any number of materialist thinkers. But in the modern world there are three in particular, all of whom claim to be scientists, who have had a decisive impact on contemporary thinking. They are Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Karl Marx (1818-1883), and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Together they represent a continuity of thought that moves from the more universal to the more particular.
Darwin’s province was all of biological nature. Marx was concerned with a less extensive domain, human society. Freud concentrated on the individual. Freud borrowed from his predecessor Marx, just as Marx borrowed from his predecessor Darwin. Although their respective spheres of interest narrowed, Darwin strengthened Marx just as Marx empowered Freud.
This triumvirate has made a powerful case, bolstered by scientific claims, that matter alone is real. Nonetheless, the exclusion of the spiritual domain is the exclusion of a vital truth. Materialism does not occupy the center of things. It is fragmentary, one-sided, and incomplete.
I refer to the second fragmentary trend as “metaphysical” in a qualified sense and I give Jean-Paul Sartre credit for establishing it as an influential trend in the contemporary world. When this French existentialist declared that “existence precedes essence,” he introduced a view of the human being as an existing “nothing” who defines himself or achieves his unique essence through freedom. This view, unrealistic as it may appear, has found great favor among people in the modern world.
Secular feminists, in particular, regard the notion of not being circumscribed by a nature and being free to create one’s self as most appealing. Simone de Beauvoir, whose feminist philosophy mirrors that of her longtime companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, is celebrated as the intellectual matriarch of modern feminism.
A number of like-minded feminists have carried this notion to its logical conclusion at which the very nature of woman evaporates. Judith Butler, who began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in 1993, separates gender from biology. Accordingly, she writes, “When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.”
The Bulgarian/French philosopher Julia Kristeva maintains that “strictly speaking, ‘women’ cannot be said to exist….I understand by ‘woman’ that which cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies.” Nonetheless, Dr. Kristeva advises that the word “woman” should be maintained since it offers them political advantages.
The materialistic trend excludes all that is spiritual. In the final analysis, man is not free. The metaphysical trend goes further by removing the very essence of a thing. Here, it is claimed that man is absolute freedom. The fact that there is matter represents a truth, however partial that truth may be. The notion that there are no women also contains a truth in the sense that each woman is a unique individual and cannot be grasped completely in a stereotype. In other words, only the individual exists, the universal is just an idea. As fragments, however, they are centrifugal, flying away from the center. Therefore, they are impractical and cannot provide a blueprint for living.
The Church, as the “center,” reconciles the conflict between matter and spirit through the Incarnation. Christ is both body and spirit, a comprehensive truth which serves as an image of each body/soul human being. The fundamental point of St. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” is that we humans are spiritualized bodies. We are neither angels nor robots. Secondly, the Book of Genesis states, “Male and female He created them.” Men and women have different vocations and different roles to play in the life of the Church. As St. John XXIII has stated, accurately and precisely, “Men and women are equal in dignity, complementary in mission.”
The materialistic and metaphysical trends leave the human being radically deprived. The former leaves man without a soul; the latter leaves him without a nature. Thus, we have materialistic atheism on the one hand, and the present confusion about gender on the other. The Church is indeed a center, integrating the various loose ends that may be popular into a coherent and realistic fabric.
The Catholic Church offers the world a realistic anthropology, a true understand of man, grasping the nature of the human being as a body/soul entity and recognizing the God-established complementary differences between male and female.
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