Reviewed by John Peterson
Following the dedication page, the first thing you'll read in this remarkable book is the beginning stanza of Chesterton's poem The Deluge, which speaks of a “nameless man” who “stood up and drank to God.” Professor McInerny may view this volume as a toast offered to the Lord. And he may also in all humility see himself as a nameless man.
But Ralph McInerny is hardly nameless to us. He is a prolific writer of popular nonfiction and fiction, often humorous, whose output includes countless murder mysteries. The Father Dowling series is the best known of these, due no doubt to the television series. McInerny has founded two journals of opinion, Crisis magazine and Catholic Dossier and has authored recent polemical works on Vatican II and on Pope Pius XII. That's a career.
And meanwhile, McInerny also serves as Professor of Medieval Studies and Director of the Jacques Maritain Center at Notre Dame. From this platform he has written and edited dozens of scholarly books and articles on medieval philosophy and Thomas Aquinas.
This combination of scholarly credentials and popular writing are important for the present work. It is an accessible but by no means an easy book, for the subject is the elemental question, “Can we prove that God exists?” The accessibility stems from the author's practiced touch as the author of popular books. The difficulty stems from the subject matter, which abides in the daunting territory of metaphysics.
Actually there are two versions of this work. The first is Praeambula Fidei, which McInerny describes as a long and detailed opus addressed to professional philosophers. The second, a shorter, lighter, and friendlier version, was delivered in the form of a series of lectures at the University of Glasgow (in other words, the annual Gifford Lectures). Characters in Search, the book reviewed here, is the published form of those lectures.
McInerny's title recalls Luigi Pirandello's famous drama about six people who, realizing they are characters in a play, begin to wonder about their author. We human beings are like Pirandello's characters in that we too have an author or Author, and we too are searching for Him. The puzzle is that our best thinkers — professional philosophers whose job description includes training and expertise in reasoning and logic — say that God cannot be found. In other words, as author McInerny reminds us, atheism is the “default position” of modern philosophy. Why is this?
Why, indeed. St. Paul tells us that people can know of God without the aid of God's revelation. Does this mean it is an article of faith that we can believe without faith? That seems an odd if not contradictory notion. Again, the famous first proof of Thomas Aquinas presupposes Aristotle's theory of motion. But as Aristotle's analysis has been superceded by modern physics, does that mean that Aquinas's first proof is invalid? And if we prove that God exists, will it change anything? Should it? For the answers to these tough and fascinating questions, read Characters in Search.
And the Chesterton connection? In 1930 Chesterton served for a term as a lecturer at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. Fifty years later, in 1980, the university sponsored a “Chesterton Celebration” to commemorate the great man's visit. One of the scheduled lectures was delivered by McInerny, who playfully titled his paper “Chesterton as Peeping Thomist.” It is a paper well worth reading if one can find the obscure volume in which the proceedings were published. Better yet, you should know that Professor McInerny revised and expanded the paper for the 2001 Chesterton Conference, and a tape of the newer lecture is readily available from the American Chesterton Society.
The “Thomist” part of the “Peeping Thomist” title meant, of course, someone who is a disciple of St. Thomas Aquinas. McInerny's paper outlined several things that make Chesterton a Thomist, peeping or not, including his sage acceptance of sense perception as the basis of knowledge and the search for truth. Of course that is the idea that has disappeared from modern philosophy. It is also the kernel of the idea McInerny has developed more fully in Characters in Search.
Chesterton said that something has to be very big to be invisible. So too it is the most obvious that can be overlooked when it is not implicitly denied. Nothing is more obvious than that human beings know the common principles of theoretical and practical thinking and that these truths are latent in the discursive thinking in which they are everywhere engaged.
In this book McInerny testifies to these truths in lonely defiance of all the main steams and tributaries of modern philosophy. It is a friendly as well as a courageous book, and there is only one man who could possibly have authored it. If the citizens of United States were mentally awake and morally straight, as the Boy Scouts have it, Ralph McInerny would be declared a national treasure.
(John Peterson writes courtesy of Gilbert!, The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton.)
