“Common Thread of Conversation” ft. the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Rev. Thomas Davenport, O.P. I Saturdays at Seven – Season Three, Episode Eleven

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In the eleventh episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Rev. Thomas Davenport, O.P., Professore Incaricato di Filosofia at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Davenport begins by discussing the relationship he is striving to foster between physics and philosophy—a disconnect that is the result of the reductionistic disciplinary and sub-disciplinary silos in which those disciplines (and most disciplines) exist. Davenport contends, however, that a properly ordered relationship between physics and philosophy allows those disciplines to grapple with questions that otherwise escape them. Davenport then shares the details of his own calling to theoretical particle physics, a journey which saw him pursue graduate work at Stanford University while also introducing him to campus ministers who were members of the Order of Preachers or the Dominicans. Those relationships fostered his calling to the priesthood and, in time, a commitment to explore the ways in which the study of philosophy and physics could prove mutually beneficial. Davenport closes by sharing how his commitment to the academic vocation resides at the intersection of this mutually beneficial relationship and how the cultivation of an underappreciated virtue of studiositas proves necessary.

Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.

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Our guest is Father Thomas Davenport, Professore Incaricato di Filosofia at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thank you for joining us.

Father Thomas Davenport: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Todd Ream: To start, echoing Tertullian, I’d like to begin by asking you, what does physics have to do with philosophy?

Father Thomas Davenport: Sure. There’s this kind of, I could tell a bit of a personal story here in the sense that when I was first studying physics as an undergraduate at Caltech, I took a philosophy class as a freshman and was kind of excited about it. I, you know, had a sense that physics was about reality and it seemed like philosophy should be too.

And I remember like that, my strongest memory from that class is the professor we started with Descartes who I now love, but at the time it was just okay, doubt everything, doubt everything even to the point does the real world exist. I remember the professor, you know, dating myself here saying, well, how do we know we’re not living in the matrix? How do we know that the physical world exists?

And I’m looking around, I mean, I was there to study physics and I was there at Caltech with, you know, chemists and biologists and engineers and you know, the mathematicians, but who knows what they’re thinking, but like everybody else, like, we’re here to study the real world. Like why are we wasting our time worrying about this? And it kind of left me with a bad taste for philosophy.

And it was only later as a graduate student, you know, some book recommendations by friends, and I came to realize that there was more to philosophy than just sitting around and asking questions to annoy people or asking questions just for the sake of asking questions. And I came to realize that what I was most interested about in physics actually was deeply connected to what I would say are the best aspects of philosophy as well, about a reasoned and organized understanding of the real world.

And historically speaking, that’s where physics comes from. I mean, the fact that, you know physics as physics only comes to, comes in, again depending on exactly how you carve it up, the way we would say or science as separate from philosophy and physics as a part of that, is a much later development. I mean, if you look at Galileo and Newton, they’re writing books on the philosophy of nature and they’re doing philosophy.

And even up through the 20th century, even when there had been a kind of divide between the disciplines and sort of, you know, more philosophical conversations that were different than scientific conversations, there was great overlap between the scientists and philosophy and in particular, between physics and philosophy. I mean, the early 20th century, the sort of fathers of quantum mechanics are deeply involved in philosophical conversations in the midst of their work.

And so the kind of antagonism perhaps or fight between physics and philosophy, or at least the separation, it’s not saying that it’s unique to the 20th century, but I think there’s a unique, there’s something about the way it exists today that is somewhat unique in history. There have been debates about whether philosophy can do what it can do without the sciences or vice versa, you know, earlier than that.

But the kind of way in which it’s almost just two different worlds sometimes you know, you hear physicists saying things like, you know, Stephen Hawking in the beginning of his book talking about philosophy is dead. It’s given up on the important questions and then writes a book about philosophy afterwards.

But I understand where physicists can get that idea because there are even today, I would say, I mean, if I went and grabbed a random book of philosophy or look at a random philosophy article out of the, you know, many hundreds being published every year, the chances are that I would find something really interesting and insightful in there. Personally, I don’t know, maybe.

I joke that sometimes I still feel like I’m a—I’m a physicist pretending to be to do philosophy, but more properly, I think I’m just the kind of philosophy I’m interested in is philosophy that’s ordered towards the physical world, ordered towards nature and reality. That in a certain sense, takes the physical world for granted and then asks, what can we know about it and why can we know it? So there’s certain, certain sections of kinds of questions in philosophy and ways of doing philosophy that it’s not say that they’re not important in general. I say, you know, could debate about that in others. But the kind of philosophy that I find most interesting is the stuff that’s sort of, is very, very closely connected to physics in many ways.

And I think physics, when you really look at it, particularly again in the 20th century, it starts to brush up close so closely to questions that open up beyond what physics can answer. We see this particularly with quantum mechanics, that, you know, there are questions that we want to know answers to, that physics is refusing to answer for us. And so we have to have another tool to answer that. And the best, the best tool we have is, is good philosophy, 

Todd Ream: So in your estimation then, do the two, philosophy and physics then need each other or perhaps absent a properly ordered relationship? Are these two disciplines incomplete without one another?

Father Thomas Davenport: So I have, yeah, I guess I would say I have a, a technical view of this, which is drawing out of the Thomistic tradition of philosophy, of which I am sort of been trained and very, very intrigued by and find very useful. So, you know, if you look back to, you know, Aristotle you know, physics, physics gets its name from his book on, on the physical world. And physics just was the philosophical study of nature. Again, that changed over time in the medieval period and, and a lot has happened since the time of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.

But I really do think that fundamentally speaking, we’re aiming at the same kinds of questions. Now, the methods are going to be different and, and there are ways in which there are questions that sort of more traditionally philosophical tools are better at and questions that building a really large building a really large machine like the Large Hadron Collider are better at answering.

But that if we understand how these different disciplines are related, that there’s a kind of continuity between them. And it’s particularly where those edge cases are, where we’re moving out from the kind of specific details of categorizing our observations to what does this say about motion and change in general, the nature and structure of reality that we’re starting to move into what would be more classically philosophical questions. And I would argue that really they are part of one conversation.

Now in practice they, you know, they require sort of slightly different skills in certain sense senses. But I do think there’s a sense in which they’re both incomplete without one another, that a philosophical study of the natural world is incomplete if it doesn’t try to take seriously the results of contemporary science. And that there are there’s an incompletion to physics and the sciences if they don’t at least open up to the deeper philosophical questions.

It’s not that physicists are doing their job poorly, it’s just there’s questions that they could be asking that they’re not, may not be asking yet.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Perhaps you’ve already mentioned one or two of these, but when you review the various sub-disciplines that populate physics, are there any of them that find themselves yearning for input from philosophy more than others who are butting up, you know, in terms of the questions they’re asking with philosophy maybe than some others in physics?

Father Thomas Davenport: You know, a certain sense, I think any serious study of the, of the, the natural world is going to raise, you know, any, any attempt to sort of organize our observational patterns of reality to try and understand why things happen in the physical world the way they do in some, some concrete detail, are going to kind of butt up against certain questions that are not the sort of thing you can run an experiment to figure out the answer to. Or that may not have an answer in a mathematical equation and might require a more philosophical question or a kind of philosophical approach.

But I think in some, so I think any study probably does but I think there, if you look at different disciplines, you can see different ways and places where that question is raised. I think for instance in, if you think about astronomy and cosmology, you know, just the notion of the Big Bang raises huge questions about beginning, end, time, and space, which are traditionally very philosophical conversations. I mean, cosmology used to be a purely philosophical conversation, if not theological.

Quantum mechanics, I think, butts up against these issues where there are questions we want to ask the physical world and the physical world is refusing to answer. And there’s no experiment that we’ve been able to find, and seemingly no experiment we could do to answer some of these questions.

But even, you know, some of these lesser physics disciplines, like if you think about condensed matter physics. Condensed matter physics, you know, which oftentimes, oh, that’s just, you know, the particle physicist in me still has a little bit of a chauvinism about particle physics. It’s like, oh, well that’s just, that’s just working out the details to condensed matter physics.

And yet for condensed matter physicists, one of their sort of founding works by one of their own is more is different. It’s a kind of philosophical claim that when you put lots and lots of atoms and particles together, something strange happens. And so the question of emergence, the question of hierarchy and structure in nature is just built into condensed matter physics in a way that it’s almost absent in particle physics.

So I think lots of disciplines open up to philosophical conversation and some of them in interesting in different ways. And with that, I think, different kinds of physicists have different kind of inherent philosophical intuitions. In part what they’ve kind of drunk with the water as they’ve learned their own discipline.

Todd Ream: I want to transition now to asking you some questions about your own vocation as a physicist and as a philosopher. You mentioned that you were an undergraduate, earned your degree from Caltech in physics and then a PhD in theoretical particle physics from Stanford.

At what point in time did you begin to discern that physics would play a critical role in terms of how you understood your vocation?

Father Thomas Davenport: I guess, yeah, where, where physics fit into my vocation, I’m not even sure I thought about it as a vocation at the time, just in terms of where I was headed in my life. There’s a sense in which I just, I was always good at math. I liked puzzles. I liked solving math puzzles. I liked doing hard math problems. And I just got into math and computers.

And physics was this really fascinating place where math actually tells you something about physical reality, which is kind of cool. And the more I kind of got into that, the more I started looking at the amount of things we could say about physical reality using mathematics, the more intrigued and fascinated I became. And so in some ways, my first love was physics. And my first, my first love was math, but like math ordered towards the physical world and just trying to understand all the patterns that we can find and how to use the tools we have to describe those.

Now if you think vocation in the traditional sense of a religious vocation in some sense, that came later. You know, the question of exactly how that would fit with physics is a kind of a later issue, I guess.

Todd Ream: Were there any mentors during your years at Caltech or perhaps at Stanford who contributed to that process? 

Father Thomas Davenport: Absolutely I had both in terms of very, very good, you know, mentors on the physics side, just some of my professors that, you know, I mean, just Caltech and Stanford are amazing schools and with some of the best physicists and, and, and teachers. And I learned so much from so many professors there and so many students there.

In particular, I mean, you know, my doctoral advisor Michael Peskin who kind of shepherded me through,that was a great example of someone who had both deep intellectual insight and a gift for teaching. There’s a certain kind of professor where you could ask a question you walk away feeling, like, feeling like you, you understand less than you started with. Michael was someone who could take your question and figure out where the problem was, and he could, he himself could move down the layers to where you were, figure out where you were and help you to walk your way back up. And so I really got a lot out of just on the physics side from him.

I guess on the side of the question of the vocation to the priesthood, in some ways that in a parallel way happened most strongly at Stanford. I had some very good priests I knew growing up as a Catholic at various points. And you know, the idea of the priesthood, the idea of a kind of serving the Lord was in the back of my mind here and there, but, you know, it was like, I’ll think about that later. I’ll worry about that later.

In particular, there was a priest in high school, Father Terry Specht, who was a huge influence on me. He himself actually had a PhD in physics from the Navy, from doing nuclear submarines. Again, I knew that was a possibility in some ways, but I never really thought much about it.

But it was really my time at Stanford where the chaplains at Stanford were the Dominicans, the Dominican Friars were the, the, the Catholic chaplains there. And when I began to kind of, while in the midst of graduate school, kind of ask, well, Lord, what do you want me to do with my life? In some ways I had kind of just been going with the flow. I loved physics and it seemed to be a good thing to study and I was being given opportunities to do that.

But you know, grad school was a good time, but a finite time. And the question of what next? What was next along the way started to come in, and, and with some good advice and some good counsel from some of the priests I knew I started thinking about that and praying about that more, and by the time I was sort of finishing up at Stanford, the idea of vocation with the Dominicans had become much, much stronger in my life.

Todd Ream: The transition then from Stanford and your study at Palo Alto, shortly after that you moved to Washington, DC where you earned your licentiate in philosophy from Catholic University and were ordained the Order of Preachers or the Dominicans. You mentioned that the Dominicans were the staff chaplains at Stanford.

Can you tell me a little bit more about your calling to the priesthood, but then also to the Dominicans in particular? 

Father Thomas Davenport: Again, so as, as I mentioned, you know, I was raised in Catholic and, you know, kind of, I mean a normal Catholic family, I guess, I don’t know, whatever that means. You know, Mass every Sunday and, and, and catechism classes. And, you know, looking back it was, it was, it was both very good. Although, you know, there were parts of my formation that probably could have been better. Parts of my formation, I ignored, things like that.

But it was sort of the Lord, the Lord took care of me and kind of put the right people at the right time along the way. You know, my parents were always there and always a great source of support and strength on that. But then priests here and there, friends here and there to kind of push me in the right direction whether it was on the physics side or the calling to the priesthood side.

And yeah, that time at Stanford in particular became very fruitful for me. I mean, my Caltech was great, but in many ways I was still in this mode of not wanting, like being afraid to talk about my faith. I was, you know, I never lost my faith. I was confident in it, but it was the sort of thing where like you just don’t talk about, you know, religion and politics with anybody.

But by the end of that I was hungry for conversation. And it started a little bit of that at Caltech, but really when I got to Stanford, the Catholic community there, meeting other graduate students who were studying the sciences, but also wanted to have a Bible study, wanted to have fellowship, and priests who could, I could turn to in, in a much stronger way. That became a great source of consolation and a great source of strength.

And so I was, in many ways, I was, you know, studying physics a lot, but I was also just studying my faith a lot more. You know, reading the, reading the Scriptures and building up a habit of prayer. I mean, the biggest thing really was that I really took on seriously a prayer life in a way that I hadn’t really before. Prayer was always there, but it was sort of that thing you did when stuff got bad. So it’s like, oh no, I’m in trouble. I should pray. But by the time I got to that, I got some good advice that first year of graduate school about praying every day.

And so every day, you know, before I poured myself a bowl of cereal, I would spend, you know, at first 5 and 10, 15 minutes praying. And part of that prayer was just, Lord, what do you want me to do in my life? And it was interesting because you know, you get, I get questions about this now, about, you know, people can, considering a vocation, particularly a vocation to priesthood. And sometimes there’s a sense of like, I need to know right now. I need to figure out the answer, and it’s really important that I know exactly right now because I have a decision to make.

And for whatever reason, I never felt that stress about it. I guess being in graduate school, I knew I had no sense I was going to leave, but it was like there’s, I need to know something and, you know, four or five years from now when grad school’s ending, what’s next? And so I, you know, was earnestly and seriously asking the Lord each day as part of my prayer, but not expecting anything immediately. Just, you know, when, when you’re ready, let me know and I’m here.

And by the time I had to know my mind was already made up. Now I had been having, you know, I had met the Dominicans, I had been having conversations with them. I had gone to their seminary, which is in Berkeley, not too far from us, gotten to know a lot of the young men joining the Dominicans, seen the particular way that Dominican religious order lives community life and prayer. Kind of very monastic tradition of prayer, as well as the way in which the intellectual life and the life of prayer are, are lived together as Dominicans.

And the more I kind of saw the Dominican life lived and got to know more Dominicans, the more I fell in love with it, the more I fell in love with the idea of the Dominicans. And so by the time I was, you know, finishing up grad school and just like, well, I need to start making decisions about what’s next, in some sense, my mind had already been made up and it was just a matter of letting everybody else know. 

Todd Ream: Following ordination you served on the faculty at Providence College. What components of your appointment there at Providence teaching, research, and service did you find most fulfilling?

Father Thomas Davenport: Maybe I just realized, maybe go back one little thing about leading up to ordination. Just to say, so I had just finished a doctorate in physics. As a Dominican, we do have a one year, we have what’s called a novitiate. So I took a year where there were no, you know, not technically a, a student or classes just learning to be a Dominican.

But then, yeah, as you mentioned, I started from scratch in Washington, DC with two years of philosophy and three years of theology first, which is on the, you know, the, the, the standard formation for the priesthood for Catholic priests. And then on top of that, I did this two years of philosophy, the licentiate at Catholic University.

And in some sense it was starting from scratch you know, starting all over with philosophy. But I really kind of fell in love with philosophy there and started to see the way in which you know, I’d already, I’d already known that the, the, the, the, the vestige of what I had from, from undergrad had been washed away, that there was a good philosophy out there, but really starting to dive into what would it look like to do a kind of, particularly a kind of philosophy drawing out of the Aristotelian, Thomistic tradition and what that would look like to really engage with contemporary science in a really serious way.

The physics was there. It was in the back of the mind. It was always a possibility, but I kind of had set it aside for, for, at that point, five or six years. But as formation was going on, I was approached by my superiors about the possibility of going to Providence College to teach physics. And so it was both something I was open to but also a little bit scared of. I had been away from physics for five for, for again, at that, by the time I got there, it was eight years. And so I was like, can I still do this? Have I forgotten everything? Do I know how to, do I know how to do an integral anymore?

And so I, you know, did a little bit of work in some of the summers leading up to it, did some, some summer teaching and things like that just to kind of grease those wheels again. But yeah, so I went to Providence College to teach physics but with the idea of trying to find a balance between teaching physics and the philosophy and the broader conversation on faith and science.

But there again, the day job was teaching physics mostly kind of freshman introductory physics, although I gotta teach some quantum mechanics as well. And I kind of fell in love with physics again. It’s not that I had lost the love of it, but I guess I was a little bit afraid of it, but the combination of, you know, walking into a classroom in a religious habit and teaching physics and getting some funny looks the first few minutes and they’re like, oh wait, this guy’s know what he’s doing. I guess we got, you know, we have physics to learn, let’s do this.

But also opportunities to get back into some physics research both you know, got to know some professors at Brown, got to know some, you know, both the professors there at Providence College, Professors at Brown across town. Even when I was in Washington, DC, getting to know professors at Catholic University, University of Maryland. And just kind of entering back into the world of physics.

In a certain sense, it secured my confidence that I really had learned physics and I really had earned a doctorate. I really had, you know, an understanding of the foundations and an ability to enter into serious conversations in physics. And so that two years at Providence College was very formative and very good for me.

When I arrived, I presumed in a certain sense, that’s where I would most likely be for a very long time so the idea that was, you know, the idea was that it would be a long-term assignment, but what was the, the best experience I got of it was one, just the, the skills in teaching the reinvigoration of that, that desire to teach but also just a kind of reestablishment of that confidence in physics as such when I had kind of been away from it for several years.

Todd Ream: We now serve on the faculty at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, also known as the Angelicum. individuals unfamiliar with it, would you please offer a few details concerning its history and the course of study that it offers?

Father Thomas Davenport: Sure. So the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, or as colloquially known, the Angelicum is one of seven Pontifical universities here in Rome, so they are accredited under the auspices of, of the Vatican. The Angelicum is run by the Dominican friars. The order that I’m a part of.

And so like all of the pontifical universities, it is primarily ordered towards the formation of priests and religious but with also a broader scope at auspices. So we have four faculties here at the Angelicum theology being the largest, then philosophy Canon Law and Social Sciences. We have about a thousand students, but being here in Rome though it’s not just Italians. We have students from all over the world, a hundred different countries represented approximately, and a lot from developing nations and a lot from the Global South.

And so it’s a real privilege to walk into your classroom and, you know, in one sense you’re here in Rome and you really are teaching the world and you’re teaching people that are getting degrees with the intention of going back to be the teachers in their home countries. So we have a great responsibility and a great opportunity to, you know, in one small place to be able to be a source of support and a source of education for the Church as a whole.

We are, you know, privileged in a certain sense, despite being such a small university to have such an illustrious amount of alumni. We have many of our alumni go back and end up becoming bishops or superiors of the religious communities. We have sisters who, and religious teaching in teaching their own communities, teaching in universities around the world. We have a number of alumni who have been martyred in, in, in war-torn areas.

And we’re, you know, now privileged to have two popes as alumni, John Paul II and now Pope Leo. And so in one sense, we’re a kind of small, kind of home run homegrown university. And yet there’s a great opportunity and gift to teach here and teach, you know, philosophy, some of the, sort of the foundational tools for priests, religious and lay people.

We do have a large number of lay people that study with so, so normal, you know, in Catholics, protestants, non-Christians, you know, again, it weighs towards the Catholic audience, but we have students from all over the world coming to us and it’s a very it’s a very different set of student body than Providence College, that’s for sure. 

Todd Ream: Would you describe your role and the efforts that you seek to advance there on behalf of the students that you serve and the Church?

Father Thomas Davenport: So in, in fine Thomistic fashion it’s, it’s good to start with the end or the telos why I’m here. The reason why I was brought here was because there was a refounding of what’s known as the Angelicum Thomistic Institute and the founder or the re-founder of that Father Thomas Joseph White, who now is the rector of the university, had the idea of taking on three particular projects. One was a project engaging Thomistic, the sort of the kind of theology rooted in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and its engagement with contemporary theology more broadly.

A similar project related to the philosophy inspired by St. Thomas Aquinas and its engagement with contemporary philosophy, both in the English speaking world and in the continental world. But also then you get an idea, have to have a project on science and religion, where we took kind of the philosophical and theological principles, drawing on the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and, and the work, the lots of work that’s been done since to engage with contemporary science and bring together scientists, philosophers, and theologians to engage in, you know, kind of concrete conversations on those topics.

So I was brought to be one of the two friars in charge of this project, along with Father Mariusz Tabaczek, a Polish friar, and a very good friend who’s written a lot on biology and divine action. And questions on evolution and emergence. But in order to do that, it made sense that I should be part of the faculty. There’s no faculty of physics here. So I joined the faculty of philosophy and it’s been a little bit time coming, but I’m finishing up my doctorate in philosophy, so the second doctorate here with so I’m an adjunct professor for now in incaricati. But with the idea of staying on, as part of the faculty, so.

Todd Ream: What kinds of questions then now, given your role, do you find most vocationally fulfilling to pursue? 

Father Thomas Davenport: I guess it’s, it’s funny, I joke, you know, so it’s, again, we are sort of small university, and so a small philosophy faculty and there’s, you know, a number of Dominicans on the, on the philosophy faculty and very good friends. And I joke it’s, it’s not technically true, but almost true that I’m the only Dominican philosopher here who’s not a metaphysician, who’s not asking questions about being as being or the ground of reality. I’m the only one who actually cares about, like, rocks and metals and plants, and like, well, what do we say about those things?

I’m very interested in filling out what I think is a kind of neglected part of this particular tradition of philosophy that is very important and central to the Dominican way of thinking about the world. But also is, you know, an important line of conversation in the Catholic world, namely, as I’ve mentioned before, the kind of line of conversation following from St. Thomas Aquinas.

If you ask any Thomists, anyone who professes to follow St. Thomas Aquinas and his teachings on philosophy, theology, they all talk about how nature is important. Grace builds on nature. It doesn’t destroy it. We have to understand nature. We have to take nature as given seriously. But if there’s one part of that conversation that’s probably been the most neglected over the last, well, several centuries, really, it is the kind of filling out the picture of nature as it actually engages with contemporary science.

How is it that we should use the sort of tools and principles that Thomists takes seriously as important at that level, but also at higher levels as you get into questions about human nature and anthropology, questions about ethics, questions about theology, if these tools are tools that we can apply to human persons, that we can apply to Jesus Christ, that we can apply to the Trinity, that we can apply to the sacraments, can we also apply them to quarks and bosons? Can we apply them to DNA? Can we apply them to Bose-Einstein condensates? And in a certain sense, you know, the presumption is, yeah, of course we can, but no one’s really tried or not many people have tried. And so I’m very interested in trying to fill out that part of this broader conversation.

And in one sense that’s an odd, quirky, cover project of, okay, we’ll take these odd medieval or even ancient principles and apply them to quantum mechanics. But it’s been striking to see how, in a funny way, from an opposite direction, there’s a, a parallel conversation coming in from contemporary philosophy of science, that is looking back towards principles broadly from Aristotle and taking much more seriously Aristotelian notions of causation Aristotelian notions of nature. And again, not because they’re Aristotelian or not because, you know, St. Thomas and the medievals use them, but because they just seem to work to make sense of what the sciences are and, and why they work. And so it’s been interesting just to find that it’s not just me sitting in a room talking to myself, but there are actually philosophers and scientists who are intrigued by the possibilities that these kinds of tools have to offer.

Todd Ream: In order to address these questions, these neglected questions, you know, over recent decades, if not centuries then, in what ways have your methodological commitments needed to adjust and/or be developed or advanced?

Father Thomas Davenport: Yeah, so I guess I would say the thing that I have drawn the most fruit from in an interesting way and what I found, personally, the way I approach particular questions so for instance, you know, if I want to try to think deeply about what light in terms of photons and, you know, as an actual physical structure that we understand in contemporary science and not just visible light, but x-rays, gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves, things Aquinas thought nothing about, if I want to take those things seriously from a specific perspective, how do you go about doing that?

And there’s a version of this where it’s like, well, Aquinas doesn’t have everything to say there, so we have to start from scratch. Or we’ll take a couple of these basic principles and just attach them as best we can and see where we go. And in so far as people have tried to do that, it can be helpful and useful at times, but I often find it to be, in so far as people have tried it, it can be a little bit clunky.

In a funny way, I have found it most useful to actually dig really deeply into what Aquinas himself is saying on various topics. And not just him then, like looking at some of his contemporaries, Albert the Great and others, because in so far as, and in some sense, understanding the physical world as they understood it, again, in a way that we now know to be wrong. So the four elements theory, the, the, the crystalline spheres, the geocentric of the world. This is, you know, not true. This vision of the world is not true.

But in learning more about how they did understand the world, understand why and how they introduced and used the principles they were using, why it is they’ve talked about the different kinds of causes, the way in which one physical object can, can work through another physical object to bring about something else on, on a third thing. And the details about how they thought about these things without, you know, not presuming it’s easy or presuming it’s, it’s not helpful, it actually has given me, I feel like, more flexibility on how those principles actually work.

And it’s how they were actually used by people who took them seriously in their own day and has given me some flexibility about how to think about that and think seriously about those things today. And what kinds of questions given me tools for approaching and thinking through questions they never would’ve considered.

In a funny way, I mean, and sometimes it’s, it’s not in the obvious places. I mean, some of the most interesting things that I’ve learned from Aquinas that actually are useful for contemporary science are in his eschatology in his conversation about the resurrected body because he’s taking this Aristotelian worldview and applying it in a context Aristotle never would’ve thought of and thinking about what an incorruptible glorified body would look like.

Now, there aren’t any incorruptible, glorified bodies around. That’s not what we’re dealing with in the physics, in physics today, in the sciences today. But understanding how Aquinas used and didn’t use his principles, helps you to understand how you can and should apply his principles today. Again, some of the most interesting things he had to say about light are in the context of exactly what is going on in the kind of the luminosity of Christ’s resurrected body.

Some of the most interesting things he has to say about bodies and quantification and physicality are in the context of trying to explain why it is that Christ’s body could go through a door to get into the upper room. So in these seemingly odd, purely theological contexts, he actually gets into some interesting physical details that, again, don’t just copy, paste into today, but give you some insight into, if we want to take these tools seriously, how, how would someone who was really, really deeply formed in them, how did they think about those two principles? And then trying to use that in a conversation today.

Todd Ream: Thank you.

As our time, unfortunately begins to become short, I want to transition now to asking you about how you understand the academic vocation. And as a physicist and a philosopher, what qualities or characteristics define your understanding of that vocation as you exercise it? 

Father Thomas Davenport: It’s interesting because I think this you know, you talked about how, you know, what, what has had to change in my methodology and I, if, if there’s any change I could point to about, you know, where I was as an academic when I was studying physics to where I am as an academic today, the biggest change is not so much in a methodology, but again, in the sense of the, the purpose.

You know, when I was studying physics, you know, why did I want to study physics? Well, because I just liked studying physics. It was fascinating and I enjoyed it and it’s not a bad reason to study something. But I never really at that time had a kind of direction it was headed per se. You know, I had some broad sense that yeah, maybe I could become a professional, become a professor, become a physicist, whatever that means. You know, I didn’t have any academics in my family. I was, you know, kind of just on, you know, kind of just going out there and figuring it out on my own in a certain sense.

But at times when I, particularly in graduate school, the first time studying physics, there are times when, I mean that was good, but it wasn’t enough. It didn’t always get you through the hard days. I think the, the, the thing that my religious vocation has changed about my life as an academic, which then infuses the way I think about both physics and philosophy is the kind of telos, the what it’s ordered to, that ultimately my, my life and everything about it including my teaching and my odd musings about quantum mechanics of light and what Aquinas would say about it.

These are ordered towards the praise and glory of God, first and foremost and towards doing His will, which for me as a Dominican religious becomes quite clear in the sense that I have been assigned here to teach here and to run this project at the service of the Church to serve, you know, directly my students and their formation, to prepare them with some of the, the philosophical foundations that will support them in their philosophical and theological studies so that they can become the, the teachers, the pastors the ministers that the Church needs as well as to be a combination of a witness and a source and a resource for a broader intellectual community.

You know, kind of starting close at home to, you know, the intellectual community here at the Angelicum, to the broader intellectual community of, in different directions of, you know, Catholic philosophy and theology more broadly the intellectual community in particular, in the work I’ve done with Society of Catholic Scientists of scientists who are believing Christians and believing Catholics who wanna take their faith seriously and being at a kind of a resource for them as well.

And a resource as a witness to the, the real possibility of bringing together faith and science, both in a general way, but also in like really, really particular ways. It’s kind of interesting to see when you come across, you know, a young person who is studying, you know, who’s spending their lives, you know, preparing to spend their life to study condensed matter physics or to study nanotechnology or to study neuroscience. And there’s, they want to get a sense of, well, how does this fit in with my faith?

And to be able to actually nerd out with them about it, to like dig into the details of like things that they’re studying in real detail and talk about the philosophical implications of that and how that is part of a picture of reality that is not just about the physical world but touches on what, like what properly speaking and properly ordered places it in context with what it means to be a human person, which opens up to what it is to be a Christian and what it is that God is calling us to.

And so to kind of help them to situate the, the really technical details of what they’re doing in a, kind of, as you brought it, the vocational picture for them. That is, you know, in some ways some of the most fulfilling and interesting conversations I get into, touch on that of how does, you know, how to live a scientific vocation well as, as a Christian.

Todd Ream: Thank you.

As a physicist and philosopher then, what virtues, particularly intellectual and moral virtues do you believe are most important to cultivate?

Father Thomas Davenport: Again, you know, I think there’s the general virtues of, of, of studiositas, of study, and the consistency and regularity of study. That’s one I never really picked up in grad school the first time, that it’s been a work in progress still. But that ability to, you know, to, to, but in some sense that’s something you, that’s in the academic culture already of being a good student.

I think there’s also the proper sense of humility. I think that’s out there in some ways, but a humility both about what we do and don’t know about what the tools that we’re like, what the tools we’re using in a particular field are best at and where they might have weaknesses, as well as a kind of real docility. Docility to be able to recognize and, and receive input from others. I think this is when you step into a kind of interdisciplinary conversation where you’re trying to bring together scientists and philosopher theologians.

Or even if you’re just trying to bring together like physicists and biologists, there’s a certain kind of openness to, okay, my tools might not work perfectly there, and how do I have the kind of humility to, you know, be willing to kind of be vulnerable to not being the expert on this or that topic. And so cultivating that ability to to to be humble and to be docile in conversation in order to better understand the thing you’re really good at in the context of how it fits into a broader picture of reality.

Todd Ream: If I may as a follow up there, would you argue then that part of the challenge with hubris that often plagues the academic vocation is the result of the fact that we don’t talk with individuals or interact with individuals with areas of specialty and expertise beyond our own? And that doing so on a regular basis would actually increase the virtue of humility and its ability to be exercised?

Father Thomas Davenport: I think so. I think it’s a means for it. You know, you’ve gotta be kind of properly disposed to it. And again, you know, some people are very excited about those conversations. Other people less so. But in my own personal experience, I found that to be hugely important and helpful.

I mean, even just when I actually, I mean, it wasn’t until I became a Dominican, I mean, I had friends in undergraduate who were experimental particle physicists. I was a theoretical particle physicist. I kind of talked to them, but I never really talked to them. It wasn’t until I was a Dominican getting ready to become a physicist again and when I’m talking to real experimental particle physicists, where I realized how close we were, and yet in some ways how far apart, and getting out of that comfort zone, I think it is hugely important.

I would say this is particularly important for physicists. I think it’s particularly important for theoretical particle physicists. I mean, if I could, you know, a last little self on this where we tend to think that, well, it all comes down to us anyways, so like, biology’s complicated, but it’s all particle physics at the end. And there’s a sense in which we think like the, very broad generalization, but physicists and particle physicists, theoretical particle physicists in particular, sometimes come across as well. We’re thinking about the most fundamental, we’re thinking about the most real. And so this is where the real answers are.

And I think the more you realize how, how competent scientists are at every other level of, of reality, when you really dig into just how detailed the knowledge of the experimental particle physicist, the condensed matter physicist, theoretical or particle, the, the quantum chemist, the organic chemist, the molecular biologist the systems biologist, and, you know, really try to engage with their things. I mean, there’s their work in detail. I think it gives you an appreciation for what you do have, but also recognition of where it fits into a bigger picture of reality.

I would say I’ve learned more science in the last five years at the Angelicum than I had in a good decade or two before that. I learned a lot of, I can say, I mean, I’ve learned tons and tons of physics at Stanford, but I’ve learned more science broadly since I started working in these interdisciplinary conversations. And it’s enriched my understanding of physics in a deep way.

Todd Ream: Against what vices then do you believe it is most important to be vigilant against? In terms of the exercise of the academic vocation?

Father Thomas Davenport: Sure. I think drawing on the Thomistic tradition, there’s this odd, you know, linguistic quirk of history where, where there’s a, a particular vice that in, in the scholastic tradition in St. Thomas talks about of curiositas, which again, today we tend to think of curiosity is a good thing and it is a good thing in a certain context.

But curiositas is, in its negative sense, is the desire to know things you don’t need to know. And I think there is a certain discipline that we have. And so again, there’s certain discipline we should have about what can we do and what, what can we not do? What are the questions that I can handle on my own? What are the questions that I can’t handle on my own? What are the questions that just I don’t need to handle right now?

And being able to have that, again, that humility to recognize where my focus can and can’t be. And that I, that idea that either I should be the expert on everything, and so either then I spend all my time trying to learn every single little thing or that I, you know, not trusting the input of others.

I think there is again, that kind of intellectual hubris again, I think this is for cultural reasons, most problematic, for the more theoretical sciences and especially theoretical physics just to have this tendency to think that, well, we’re getting the real answers, and so we should be able to answer everything. I think that’s another issue and worry.

I think there’s also a kind of a lack of patience that can be built, that can come in sometimes where, whether you’re, whether, again, whether that’s in conversation with others who don’t understand the, you know, who don’t have the kind of training you do there’s a way in which, learning how to have that patience as a teacher, have that patience as a mentor, but even just have that patience as a human being in different contexts, to try as best you can to take what you have learned and bring it down to a level that is accessible to the people that are right in front of that might need you at the moment.

Todd Ream: Thank you.

For our last question then today, I want to ask you, in what ways do you think the health of the academic vocation, as we’ve been discussing it, especially in a Church-related university, such as say, Providence College, is reflective of the health that the university shares with the Church?

Father Thomas Davenport: I think, yeah. There’s a way in which, particularly at a Church-run university, the idea that there should be a common thread of conversation across disciplines. This is definitely true from a Dominican perspective. I think from a Catholic perspective, the documents the Church has put out on intellectual life and the life of universities, the idea that there is this common thread of conversation that should be had between between the disciplines and that that thread ultimately is our faith. It is rooted in our faith.

Again, not that, you know, theology as queen of the sciences can come across as a very dictatorial way of talking, and yet that there is a common mission that all of our study can and should be ultimately towards the glory of God, towards the glory of the Church or towards the service of the church and its ministry here. And so that every discipline from the computer scientists to the condensed matter physicist to the literature professor, there should be a way in which they’re unified in that vision.

And I think the fragmentation that we see in universities more broadly and even in Christian and Catholic universities, reflects that kind of fragmentation we’re seeing in society as a whole and, and in the Church where we only are talking to those that we know and get along with and speak the same language as. And learning to get out of that comfort zone just on a natural human level, I think leads to a greater respect and a greater fraternity that a university should build up.

But particularly when that fraternity is infused with at least the kind of implicit spirit of the Christian vocation I think there’s a way in which we can draw greater respect and greater strength from one another, in finding our own place as academics in a Christian context.

Todd Ream: Thank you very much.

Father Thomas Davenport: Absolutely.

Todd Ream: Our guest has been Father Thomas Davenport, Professore Incaricato di Filosofia at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.

Father Thomas Davenport: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at seven Christian Scholars reviews conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.