American and Catholic
by George Weigel
In the fall of 1970, when I was a college sophomore, the first article assigned in one of my courses was titled “What Is Theology’s Standpoint?”
The author argued that a “standpoint” was “a set of experiences, images, presuppositions, expectations, and operations (of inquiring and deciding),” by which human beings made sense of themselves and their relationship to the world. Late-twentieth-century theology, he continued, should operate from an “open standpoint,” engaging the human experience in full.
Reading that article was my first encounter with the mind and spirit of Michael Novak. More than four decades later, it strikes me that the gist of the article nicely captures the range of Novak’s achievement, as well as suggesting its distinctive intellectual and cultural location.
Back then, in theological circles, a fad existed for titling articles and books “Toward a Theology of” this, that, or the other thing (a fad once neatly parodied by my Toronto colleague Margaret O’Rourke Boyle, in “Toward a Theology of Garbage”).
Indeed, the “toward” bug infected Novak on one occasion, when he christened an extended essay “Toward a Theology of the Corporation.”
But that was, I’m sure, a literary venial sin.
For Novak’s entire intellectual enterprise has never needed that faux rhetorical booster “toward.”
As he showed me in his 1968 Theology Today essay on theology’s “standpoint,” authentic Catholic intellectual life, and especially Catholic theology, is always “toward”: Catholic intellectual life consciously engages the fullness of human experience, which Catholic thinkers “read” through the prism of revelation and reason, both of which, they maintain, cast the light of truth on human affairs.
This conviction—that reflection on the things of the City of God can illuminate the paradoxes, tragedies, conundrums, and possibilities of the City of Man—stands at the center of Michael Novak’s thought.
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