“The Pursuit of Truth” ft. the University of Notre Dame’s John C. Cavadini I Saturdays at Seven – Season Three, Episode Fifty

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In the fiftieth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with John C. Cavadini, Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Cavadini begins by discussing the challenges and opportunities that define the relationships shared by the Church and Church-related colleges and universities. In particular, he highlights the significance of Ex corde ecclesiae, the beauty of the insights Cavadini believed it offered, and the mishaps that befell its implementation. As resources in aiding in that relationship, Cavadini highlights programs Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life curates and the ways the institute seeks to marshal the resources offered by a research university in service to the Church. Cavadini discusses his own vocational formation as a theologian and how his chance encounter with the writings of the Church Fathers as an undergraduate in the library at Wesleyan University rerouted his life calling from medicine to theology. Cavadini credits additional layers of his vocational formation to mentors with whom he studied as well as the Catholic university communities where he served including Loyola University Maryland, Villanova University, and, for the majority of his career, Notre Dame. Cavadini then concludes by articulating the virtues that define a calling to theology, focusing, in particular, on the virtues that make lives of intellectual friendship possible.

• John Cavadini and Catherine Cavadini’s Saints: A Family Story (Paraclete Press, 2023)
• John C. Cavadini’s Visioning Augustine (Wiley Blackwell, 2019)
• John C. Cavadini’s (ed.) Gregory the Great: A Symposium (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001)

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 John C. Cavadini, Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Over the course of your career, you’ve witnessed a number of efforts by the Church, archdioceses, dioceses, and religious orders to enhance and nurture the health of the relationship shared by the Church when, with the university.

When you look back over those efforts, which ones do you believe have proved most beneficial, and which ones perhaps do you believe have also proven to be least beneficial?

John C. Cavadini: Yeah. If you think of the Church universal, I think the publication of Ex corde ecclesiae was one of the most beneficial moves. It’s a very intelligent document, very clearly articulated. Um, it’s got a very warm spirit to it. I think it was one of the best things that happened. I think the implementation of it wasn’t very successful in terms of, at least in our country, I think that all the attention got focused on the mandatum.

And it siphoned off most of the attention from the substance of the document. And I think that that attention on the mandatum was fairly fruitless. Um, I think that most universities made a determined effort to overlook it. The bishops decided not to publish the names of those who have the mandatum. So it’s basically, it’s not exactly a dead letter, but it’s not exactly a vibrant source of Catholic identity. Um, the thing is, everything depends on the spirit in which you teach. So I mean, what you say, of course, matters.

But if you’re trying to create a culture of ecclesial fidelity and academic excellence, it really comes down to the spirit of the teaching. Because, you can advance perfectly orthodox views in class and not love them, or not like them or not know them or advance them too rigidly or advance them in a way that’s not intellectually credible. There’s all kinds of ways in which you can just, you know, basically erase the effect of doing it.

And so it really seems to me that the effort, so much effort was spent on the mandatum, that the really beautiful ideals of that document, in some cases hard ideals, but not hard because they’re harsh, because they’re hard to attain or just overlooked. And I’ve been revisiting that document and finding so much, you know, useful inspiration in it. So I think that was the most promising thing, that is the document itself, with the implementation of it was, I think, a lost opportunity.

Todd Ream: Thank you. When we talk about the relationship shared by the Church and the university and ways to enhance the health of that, those relationships, in what ways do you believe the Church, as was the case in Ex corde, takes the initiative? But also in what ways do you believe the university perhaps should take the initiative?

John C. Cavadini: I think the universities should take the initiative in creating mission statements that state forthrightly what Ex corde ecclesiae says a Catholic university should be. Um, and I think that there’s some really minimal things that even now you don’t necessarily find in university mission statements anymore, Catholic or not, namely pursuit of truth. It seems like that’s a very basic, the very basic identity of the university, but people have lost sight of it.

Most of the Ivy League schools do not have that in their mission statements any longer. In fact, all of them, I think, have left it out in favor of things like improving the world or generating knowledge to improve the world, that kind of thing. Well, corporations can generate knowledge to improve the world. That’s not the mission in the first place of a university, which is pursuit of truth. And I think that creating mission statements that talk about the pursuit of truth, and that locate it specifically in a Catholic search for truth or in a Catholic domain the way Ex corde does, would be one of the ways that a Catholic university could improve the connection between the Church and the university, and also live up to it.

Because you can have, you can have mission statements that have pursuit of truth in the mission statement, but it’s never talked about, so it’s never, it doesn’t figure in any, any speeches of administration. It doesn’t form the rhetoric of any faculty member at teaching, et cetera. You can, you can have a situation where you’ve got a mission statement which in effect is a dead letter. So I think to rededicate the university to the pursuit of truth, even that bare minimum would do a lot, I think, to improve relationships or to forge better relationships, put it that way.

Todd Ream: Thank you. How would you then assess the current relationship shared by the Church and the university, and what would you encourage or perhaps argue for as efforts moving forward?

John C. Cavadini: At our university?

Todd Ream: Or the Catholic university or Church-related universities writ large.

John C. Cavadini: I think that, um I think that Church universities writ large actually have an opportunity to lead in education. I don’t just mean Catholic education or even Christian education, I mean in education. Like I said, the Ivy League schools have lost a sense of what a university is according to their mission statements. And I’m I would never speak against improving the world or, you know, any kind of generating knowledge that would ameliorate the human condition.

But you have to ask yourself, what is the improvement of the world? Like, what constitutes improvement? If you don’t have the ultimate commitment to truth, then there can be all kinds of unreasonable and reasonable facsimiles simulacra of benefiting the world. I mean, we’re in the midst of a technological revolution, AI. Okay, what’s benefiting the world in that context?

That kind of thing needs very deep discernment along the lines of the pursuit of truth. So what is, as Ex corde said, what is the truth of the human being? If you don’t know what a human being is, if you don’t know what the truth of the human being is, how can you tell what improving the world is? If you have an idea of the dignity of the human person, then what improves the world is what improves or enhances and respects the dignity of the human person. But you’ve got to know what that dignity is.

You’ve got to, to be willing to pursue truth and discerning and seeking to understand human dignity. So that I think the I would say, I would encourage Catholic schools anyway, to think of themselves not as simply improving Catholic education, but as out there trying to improve education, period, by helping it return its foundational helping the university return to its foundational commitment to truth, and not being afraid to talk about truth.

Instead of what often happens, reducing truth to a discourse of power, so that truth simply means, whatever people, whoever has the most power thinks is true or wants to be true or says is true. But that’s when you lose the pursuit of truth explicitly, a commitment to it, that’s precisely when you are, when what is good for the world, what improves the world is going to be determined by who’s most powerful.

So I would say just stick to the pursuit of truth, what it means, defend it, you’ll have the wherewithal to improve education period, to renew it, not just Catholic education.

Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. One of the administrative roles that you held for a number of years was as the director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life. Would you offer an overview of the mission of the institute and how its mission evolved over the course of the years that you served as its director?

John C. Cavadini: Sure. I’m just finishing up those, those years. And I think basically the mission of the McGrath Institute is to build a bridge from university to church build a bridge that makes the resources of a university user-friendly, you could say, for the Church. And by the Church, I mean Church leaders at all levels. That means bishops, priests, deacons, lay catechists, directors of religious education liturgists in parishes, parish musicians, teachers, teachers of theology, teachers at a Catholic school, parents.

Parents are one of the most important leaders in the Church, and the family is the domestic church. So to try to help, we, we say we form faithful Catholic leaders, so we try to support leadership of the Church at all levels, and we try to, you might say, renew leadership in the Church at all levels. it’s a little bit presumptuous to say that we know what renewal means but, I think, you know, “Send down your spirit and renew the face of the earth.” I think that to the extent that we, that we repropose the sources of renewal at all levels of, of Church leadership, then we’re not dictating what the terms are, but we’re certainly helping people tap into the sources of renewal in the Church, which are always the same from age to age.

But we try to do this in a way that is specifically appropriate to a university. So we don’t try to duplicate what a diocese can do on its own, or something like that. We try to build ecclesial cultures or help local churches build ecclesial cultures. And in this day and age of disaffiliation, we hear, we try to think about how, how do you build a culture of affiliation and not simply respond to a problem negatively expressed.

So how do we counteract disaffiliation? That’s not a bad question, don’t get me wrong. But I think if you think of it only as counteracting something instead of thinking of it as a positive endeavor you should have always been doing, namely, how do you build a culture of affiliation, so that it makes it easier, you could say, to be Catholic in this case.

I don’t mean take the challenge out of Christian living to make it easier in that sense, but to make it so people don’t find so many obstacles that shouldn’t be there, or, or to make it so that, that which is attractive and challenging about the religion, about the Church, about ecclesial life, about the gospel, et cetera, are easier to find, and easier to receive, to tap into so that you can live the very challenging life that comes if you embrace everything Creed.

Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In what ways are these programs then that the McGrath Institute curates designed to leverage the resources that a university often possesses with an eye toward enhancing the life and mission of the Church? Perhaps you could offer an example or two of ways you’ve, you know, tried to do that.

John C. Cavadini: We have a lot. I could offer a lot of examples at different levels. Uh, we have a program called Echo. Echo is a catechetical training program. We train, we train leaders for catechesis or evangelization. Um, usually these are, these are recent grads of four-year baccalaureate programs. They come here and enroll in Echo, which also means enrolling in the MA in theology. So they earn an MA in theology in the course of two and a half years, but they also have hands-on formation in real ministry settings. So working in a parish, working, teaching theology in a school. Um, they’re out in these placements during the academic year.

The theology degree is summer study and also some online study during the academic year. So they end up with, you know, intellectual formation, but also pastoral and spiritual formation, so they know how to integrate all three things. They don’t just get pastoral formation they get intellectual. And so they, but you, you can see the bridge right there. There’s the attempt to create a bridge from intellectual formation to pastoral formation and back. And I should say also that you can see it’s a two-way bridge because all of these all these parishes in which we place people or schools in dioceses with which we have a partnership.

So we get a lot of information back, right, about what the Church really needs as opposed to what some academic like me thinks it might need. So it’s important that there’s like outreach and in-reach, you might even say. Um, we have a program called Notre Dame Vision. That’s, that’s a summer program for high school students. Um, the program lasts a week. We can float up to four weeks where we welcome of high school students.

We don’t tell them this because they’d get the wrong idea off, right off the bat, but the whole point is to help them think about their life in terms of a calling from God, in terms of vocation. The reason we don’t say that is that because they’ll think that we’re just recruiting people to be priests and nuns, which, you know, would be great if they are, but the point is, how do I think about my life as a, as a call from God? What are the scriptural, and traditional, and liturgical sources that help me do that?

And we form about 60 to 70 of our own undergraduates, we call them mentors in faith, to work with the high school students. And so it’s also very formative of our own students. We train them for a whole year for this. Um, and we have we have not-for-credit digital theological education called STEP. In Spanish, it’s Camino. We have a program called FIAT, which is newer, we, we reach out, it’s a program that helps pastoral works in the church, priests, and others to be more pastorally effective with those who have mental illness or their families.

We leverage lots of the research and teaching resources of the university to create this program and to enact it. Um, we have Church Life Journal, which is an outreach of its own to anyone interested, you might say, any educated person interested in all the issues that come up in the life of the mind, in the life of the Church, et cetera at the intersection between Church and the thinking and the mind.

Um, have Saturdays with the Saints. Saturdays with the Saints. That’s a, a very popular lecture series on every football Saturday. So every football Saturday at 10:30 to 11:30, there’s this, there’s, there’s a lecture on a saint of current interest. Um, the audience for that are alumni who return, fans who come to the game of both teams. Um, you know, there’s Catholics and Christians on both, on all the teams, who are interested.

Our own students and faculty and community members. So this yeah, it’s always a faculty member who gives a talk, so you can see the bridge there. But the thing is, the saints the saints are very appealing to people. Part of the reason is they’re low stakes. You don’t have to make a huge commitment and learn about one of the saints. Um, you don’t have to go to Church. Nobody’s going to watch you.

But at the same time, their lives are very inspiring, so it’s, it’s a way for some people to come back to the Church, getting in at the shallow end, you might say. It’s a way for people already very committed to deepen their connection, deepen their faith. Um, so these are a few of the programs. There’s quite a few others, but you kind of get the idea.

We have a program. We’ve run a conference for the for the USCCB, for Bishops of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops every other year on a topic of their own choosing. Um, so we, we do try to work at all the different levels.

Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now about your own calling then as a theologian. You earned a bachelor’s in religion from Wesleyan University, master’s in theology from Marquette, two more master’s degrees from Yale University, which I have to note at this point, you may have been eligible to process at three different graduation exercises in six years. But then also a PhD from Yale.

At what point, though, did you discern that the study of theology would play a critical role in how you were called to exercise your vocation?

John C. Cavadini: Yeah, that’s if I answer that question uh, truly, that’s going to take a long time. because actually that calling, it took me a long time to discern it. Um, there are a few points that I can remember maybe more signally. I remember being an undergraduate. I remember being in a New Testament class that was taught by someone who wasn’t on regular faculty. This person wasn’t necessarily friendly to the Christian faith. Um, and my first exposure to sort of New Testament studies in the academy, it was difficult.

But it was even more difficult for another member of the class. I think he must have been a Southern Baptist. Um, I don’t know, judging from his accent. I don’t know. You can’t judge. He was an African American guy and he just looked horrified the whole time, and I just wished I could help him. Um, but I couldn’t help myself. And I thought, “You know what? I’d like to be somebody who can help people like him and like myself um, better.”

At the same time, I, I was a pre-med. I was studying. Anyhow, I I did apply to medical school and I got in, actually twice, but I never went because I felt as though my own gifts were more in the domain of discerning riches of the Christian tradition most, that most people don’t know about that lie untapped and untouched, and that I have a talent for re-articulating them, I guess you could say. 

If I had to decide what would I miss more, that or being a doctor. And I decided finally I’d miss that more, because I, I did want to be… I thought I’d be useful as a doctor. So that’s a very short precis.

There were other moments along the way. Still, when I was at Wesleyan, I remember one other one. Since I, I’d been so turned off by New Testament, not by the New Testament, but by the way in which biblical studies seemed at that time to me to be more invested in the secondary literature than in the text itself.

But systematics, as I had been exposed to it, was largely atheist and critical. And so I didn’t want to do either of those. I happened to be in the library, like a week before graduation, I think it was senior week, and I pulled a book off of the return shelves without anything on the spine. It just looked interesting. And I opened it up, and it happened to be Gregory of Nyssa. And I thought, “Wow, this is exactly what I’m looking for.” It’s very biblical, and it’s very philosophical, and, you know, you could say analytical. So I thought, “I want to study that.” And that’s, it was just serendipity. I just pulled that book off the library shelves.

So I decided I would try to get a master’s degree, but it was too late to apply for them at that point. So I had to, I had to wait a year and work.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Mentors then along the way that also helped nurture this sense of calling?

John C. Cavadini: I had a lot of good teachers at Wesleyan, Stephen Crites and God rest his soul at, at at yeah, Jaroslav George Lindbeck. I would like to mention Hans Frei, who I never had in class. Um, you know, he wrote the Eclipse of Biblical Narrative and everything. Um, I guess I learned a lot from him about how to be professor.

I don’t mean how to teach in the classroom. I mean a certain demeanor. Not that other faculty that I, that I learned from didn’t have it, but he was very gracious and very pastoral to someone who never, i’d never had him in class. But I could tell a few stories. It’d probably take too long, but they’re very endearing ones. Um, and I thought, well, I don’t know if I thought it, but I did make some sort of interior decision. I wanted to be like that.

Todd Ream: Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned Gregory of Nyssa. Were there other authors then who proved formative to your vocation and perhaps have helped sustain it over the course of the years?

John C. Cavadini: Well, as I, I embarked on the study of Patristics early church, I really was grafted into the study of St. Augustine. And I guess for me, St. Augustine is the, my primary intellectual, I don’t know if I can say comrade, because he’s so far above me. But it’s more than just someone I study. It’s someone that I feel like I can think with him somehow. Him and also a little bit later, Origen crept up on me. And so I, I’m very deeply committed to the study of Origen, to the study of Augustine. I teach seminars on Origen and Augustine. I just finished one on Origen. It was so entirely elevated.

I mean the text we read and the discussions that came out of it, I don’t know, it’s just so deeply moving somehow and inspiring to me. Both Origen and, Augustine, I think, as major tradents of the Christian intellectual tradition of the Christian faith, who especially Origen, have not really, in a lot of ways, begun to be tapped. I know that’s silly to say that, especially with Augustine, there’s so much literature out there.

But I wonder how much we’re willing to let ourselves be formed by, not just informed, but formed by somebody like Augustine or somebody like Origen. Um, I hope to be increasingly formed by both of them. That they’re not all. I mean, I teach a lot of texts, different kinds of texts and different people. Um, Gregory the Great is someone I really have gotten to love more. St. Benedict, of course, some Athanasius and friends, you know, Ignatius of Antioch, all these people.

Thank you. When you think about the practice of theology over the course of your career, and you’ve perhaps mentioned some moments and some figures that are touchstones in this in what ways have the methodological commitments that you’ve discerned proven most fruitful to continue to advance? And in what ways then has theology perhaps even changed?

Well, if you want to use the Anselmian motto, “faith seeking understanding”, which I do want to use, I think that both Origen and Augustine are exemplars of faith seeking understanding. And I think both of them refuse to settle, you might say, for intellectual positions that may feel comfortable, but in some ways compromise the faith or don’t think as deeply as the faith impels us to with the energy it, it has as faith.

Origen has this beautiful phrase in the Contra Celsum, forget exactly where, but he says something, something like you know, we’re, we’re fond of tracking down the truth and he’s willing to look for it wherever it might be found. And he’s also willing to engage in dialogue with anyone in antiquity that he’s, that he’s able to read, but also willing to point out, also, unwilling to reduce the faith even to the most elevated pagan thought, like Plato’s.

He admires Plato, but he does not reduce the faith to a Platonic, to a Platonic system, although I know that people say that he does. Um, I think you need to read Origen more closely. What I find Origen does is that he, he really well, he doesn’t translate biblical imagery into philosophical concepts. He’s very resistant to that. In fact, he will most often use another biblical image or another biblical story to interpret, to, to find the spiritual meaning of one that he’s looking at.

But the, the idea is, when I read them, sometimes I think what they’re saying is ridiculous. Like, why would you say a thing like that? I just don’t see it. But I usually find they’re thinking more deeply than I am, and what I regard as uncomfortable is because of complacencies I have, intellectual complacencies or even spiritual complacencies. I’m always finding that they’re, they’re sort of like insisting that I look farther and I go deeper.

And I feel like that, kind of I don’t know, training in discernment to go farther and look deeper and, and to always be on guard about your own complacencies, which are, which sneak up on you without your even noticing it, is my what I hope to continue to be formed in and what I want to form students in.

Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Your career has involved service at three different church-related universities. You began your career by serving on the faculty at Loyola University Maryland, a Jesuit school. Then you served for a couple years at Villanova University, an Augustinian institution. And for the majority of your career at the University of Notre Dame, a Congregation of Holy Cross institution.

In what ways did the respective charisms of those institutions etch their way into how you understood your vocation and perhaps the way the university and the church relate to one another?

John C. Cavadini: Well, I’ve been very lucky to have worked at schools that that I liked very much and that liked me. So uh, I wasn’t at Loyola very long. But I do know that, that a kind of, sort of Ignatian style, broadly speaking, ratio studiorum was operative informed, and informed the theology curriculum when I was there, even for a year. I learned that ideal, I guess.

And at Villanova, where I loved being while I was there, the Augustinian intellectual tradition, I guess you could say was, I think was, they were beginning at that time, as I recall not that they were beginning to be formed by it, but I think they were beginning to make it a more explicit part of the intellectual formation.

And some of the seeds of what they’re doing now, you know, were started growing then. Um, but since I’m a kind of student of St. Augustine, I felt very comfortable there being able to work with Augustinian texts and being able to teach Augustine, and feeling like it was institutionally congruent is too weak a word that it was institutionally, it was a kind of joy to be able to do it there.

Notre Dame is Holy Cross. One of the things I love about Holy Cross is that they don’t talk about their charism that much, in terms of intellectual, I don’t know, an intellectual style. I’ve kind of appreciated that. It’s not that they don’t have one. I’m not saying that. But they’re pretty good about not, but not wanting to micromanage, you might say, the sort of ideals in which, which you’re teaching.

And therefore also there hasn’t grown up, grown up what has grown up at some schools the sort of way in which the charism of a religious community is almost contrasted with the Catholic identity. That is Catholic identity, bad and religious community identity, good. And so it almost becomes a pathway to secularization to emphasize the charism of religious community over against, in effect, over against the Catholic identity.

I haven’t been at such a school. I want to be clear that I’m not talking about any school I’ve been to, but was taught at. But, I think that, that the Holy Cross have been particularly good at resisting that, not, doing that

Todd Ream: Thank you. In addition to numerous articles, you’re the author and editor, I believe, of 10 books. And when you look back over the arc of your work, what sort of common iterations of questions do you find running through those efforts? Are there any arguments that you seem to find yourself returning to in terms of what you’re making, even if it’s albeit in different iterations?

John C. Cavadini: Sure. I’m always on the outlook for cliché, intellectual cliché. Um, there’s lots of received wisdom. You can learn that Augustine was a Platonist. You can learn that Origen was a Platonist. You can learn that Augustine basically retained for all of his life a kind of Manichaean taint.

And I think you can learn that Augustine taught, had such a heavy reliance on grace that he diminished free will. You can, I mean, all of these. So I’m interested in looking deeper and blowing up these kinds of received wisdom or clichés, because they’re almost never right.

People are, people are so certain that Origen is a, is a Platonist or reduces the faith to a kind of philosophical system, which I believe is a very gross I’m always trying to find the ways in which people like Origen and Augustine resist reduction of the faith to reason, even as they use reason to seek to understand the mysteries the faith, leaving them mysteries.

So expanding our appreciation of them precisely as mysteries, not understanding them in the sense that you wash out through reason the character of mystery but in which reason come, is used to understand more and more the depth of the mystery, and to be able to have some way of talking about it without resolving it into some sort of rationalist facsimile or simulacrum. that’s a kind of theme.

Another theme is I’m just interested in recovering so much of the beauty of the tradition at all, at all different levels, and presenting them at all different levels in publications, in teaching, in outreach programs. Like how do you, how do you make this stuff live again?

We belong to a living tradition. The catechism says that Christianity is not a religion of the book. It’s a religion of the living word of God. And how do we live up to that? It’s not that the word of God needs us to be alive, needs us to live, but, how do we help the life of the Church draw on, tap into the living word of God so that it enlivens the intellectual tradition that we inhabit.

I have a lot of, a, a lot of subsets of that, you might say. I’m very interested in the integrity of the Bible as the Bible of course, read within the context of the tradition of which it is the principal organ. That’s Louis Bouyer’s phrase. But I think that, a lot of secular biblical criticism, which finds its way into Christian schools everywhere really is not biblical studies. It doesn’t receive the Two Testament Bible as a thing. In fact, it more often than not talks about how these two testaments don’t fit together actually. They’re awkwardly placed.

And the Old Testament is a congeries of different genres, different interests and there’s a conflicting Christologies, theologies, et cetera, in the New Testament, so that to think that the Bible is a thing, , is basically to, to make a kind of category mistake. But is it a thing or isn’t it? Christian theology proclaims that it is a thing, and I’m interested in looking at the ways in which the Fathers in particular claimed it as a thing, claimed it as something which is worth receiving and seeking to understand.

So that the literal sense of a scriptural text, the literal sense of a scriptural text is not the same thing studying the, say, the obvious historical sense of a text. That is if you treat a biblical text the same way you treat any text hoping to find the literal sense, you’re not going to find the literal sense of scripture. The literal sense of scripture is related to the rest of scripture.

I’m not preaching against historical critical research. People have the questions they have, should be able to explore and answer them. But at the same time, I think that, if you don’t realize that the premise of much of biblical studies is anti-biblical, that is it’s not or abiblical at least. And that if we think that, as Dei verbum says, that the study of the sacred page is the soul of sacred theology, it isn’t if you don’t study it as the sacred page, but as though it were simply another, artifact, a literary artifact left over from antiquity, to be taken out of its biblical context, its wider biblical context.

So I think, that’s the source of a lot of the, I don’t know that’s the source of a lot of failure in preaching because if you think that you have to be a, a biblical historical critical expert to be able to talk about the text, then you, all you can do is fall back on moralism. The spiritual depth of the text doesn’t, doesn’t come out. So you’ve got terrible homiletics, moralizing homiletics and and the Church tends to lose its scriptural imagination. But those images are spirit proposed.

And to the extent that we repropose them, they do renew the Christian imagination, and they are the basis for the renewal of Catholic Christian culture, intellectual culture. So that’s a big hangup of mine you might say. I’m not an ideologue in the sense that I don’t want to discredit this kind of work at all. I just want to say, be attentive to what kind of premises you are buying into and how you use it. It’s pretty good at studying how the human authors are true human authors, not so good at discovering how God is the, the author of sacred Scripture.

And Dei verbum says you’re supposed to hold the two things together. The human authors are true authors and God is the author. So we don’t have, we haven’t developed a lot of, you know, really disciplined, we could say scientific ways of holding them together. But that’s why I like the Fathers because they do that.

Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. From which one of these projects perhaps did you derive the greatest vocational satisfaction? Which one did you have a sense of abiding joy in perhaps more than the others when you were in the process of pursuing it?

John C. Cavadini: I just think that there’s so many cool things in the tradition that people don’t know about, that people have received through clichéd versions, through deadening trivializations. It gives me a lot of joy to recover them. It gives me a lot of joy to find out that they’re there, and to to continue more and more to appreciate the depth of them. And then to be able to share that, and to help people see there’s way more here than you thought there was. It’s way more sophisticated than you thought, even if it’s ancient than you thought it was.

It is true for the Bible, actually. I mean, we got done reading Origen’s commentary on John, this last term, and the, I, the elevation of it, it’s entirely elevated. I don’t think you can read it without it affecting your soul, without feeling your soul elevated, and without, yeah, wanting to it to somebody. And in the process of talking about it, it seems to further elevate you, I don’t know sometimes to the point nearly of tears, it’s so beautiful. Some of this stuff is just so gorgeous if you’re patient with it. Origen’s treatment of the washing of the feet. These things are just gorgeous.

That ability to study something, see beauties that I hadn’t expected, even though I know there’s beautiful things there, and then feeling myself inspired. And it’s a joy to be able to share that with people, because I think all, I think more and more people now are, are looking for something. They’re looking for spiritual substance, sort of done with self-help so-called spiritualities.

And also the threat of AI seeming to replace or, or obviate the human soul. Where is the soul? Where can I find it in myself? How deep am I? How different am I than that machine, which tempts me to think of me as a biological version of it, only inferior? But all of these texts in a lot of ways are predicated on the depth of spirit and soul of the human person. And people are looking, where do we find that depth? How can we recover it in the face of these threats which seem to be willing to mock, mock our humanity. When actually partly becomes because we’ve lost a sense even of the mind. The mind isn’t just intellect, right?

The mind is memory, understanding, and will, all of those things. Thinking isn’t just, isn’t, isn’t just what AI does. Thinking is like a whole body sport, you know, connected to all the things you, you’ve suffered, all the things you’re suffering, all the things you’re willing and loving, of the struggle to speak out of them and speak intelligibly, to understand on a level that’s not reductionistic, and to, to bring to mind in a, you know, the great deeds of God that the Holy Spirit was talking about at Pentecost in all those tongues of the great love, the great self-emptying of the Word.

Origen talks about the soulfulness of God. Well, if you can talk about the soulfulness of God, what does the soulfulness of the human being mean and how is it connected? The sort of dimension of richness is what people are looking for, because they’re beginning to realize it’s, it’s threatened.

Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As our time begins to become short, I want to shift now to asking you about what theologians need in order to do their work and to flourish in their work. And in particular, I want to focus on asking you what intellectual or moral virtues do you believe theologians need to cultivate in order to flourish in their vocation? But then also, what theological virtues do they need to pray to receive?

John C. Cavadini: No, you need all the virtues you can get. I would say that you well, you certainly need the speculative intellectual virtues. But, as Thomas points out, the speculative intellectual virtues, you know, they make you a good thinker, a good speculator, a good, you know, even a, a good ethicist, but they don’t make you a good person. Um, so just because you’re a good ethicist doesn’t mean you’re a good person. You got to, you got to cultivate both the speculative intellectual virtues and prudence, which is the one intellectual virtue that makes you good simply in Aristotelian terms as Thomas presents them, because they depend on rectitude of appetite, which is supplied by justice, temperance, and fortitude. 

So if you’re going to be a good theologian, you need the speculative discipline. You also need moral virtue and the one intellectual virtue that’s presupposes it, which is prudence so that you can, because you have the courage basically to seek the truth and speak the truth.

And there are various dimensions in theology where I think a special challenge, which I could go into if you want, but you also have to pray for faith, hope, and love. Because if you’re not seeking to grow, praying that you might grow in faith you’re going to mistake something else for the faith.

You’re going to be willing to give yourself to something else that looks like it. Another thing is you need to have some kind of, in, in my opinion, some sort of experiential touchpoint depth or something in order to avoid reading the fathers, you might say, in my case, at a surface level and thinking that they’re, they’re so incommensurate with each other because they come from different times and places, they have different polemical concerns, et cetera, that there isn’t something underlying them that’s continuous.

And, if you’re trying to, in faith seek to understand the faith that they are, then you’re going to find that you’re not so easily going to assume that when Origen comes to write a big apologetic work like the Contra Celsum, and that when Augustine comes to write one like The City of God, that they’re not going to necessarily converge on certain salient points, and they actually do.

Both of them, we tend to think of apologetics in antiquity as philosophical exercise, and they’re both very philosophically minded, but in the end, they both are defenses of true worship. And are we? Are we unwilling nowadays to really have the courage to talk about what is true worship and to defend it? That’s what the martyrs died for. They died resisting idolatry. Are we willing to, are we willing to follow suit? I think you need to pray for faith, you need to pray for hope, because you can’t offer hope if you don’t have any.

And hope, in secular terms, too often settles for a hope that is no hope, or a hope that ultimately is not ultimate enough. Hope isn’t just a civic virtue. It is a civic virtue, but in the face of, I mean, look at the 20th century. In the face of the atrocities one after the other, what do we hope in? Are we hope in man? Are we hope in political programs? I think we should hope that our civic engagement is successful, but in the end, that’s not an ultimate hope.

The theological virtue of hope is places hope in God, strictly speaking, as its formal object, in God as revealed. And love, of course, charity is friendship with God, Thomas says. So it’s a friendship which forms you, which is why he calls it a virtue, because this friendship, the deeper you’re into it, the more it changes your identity.

You become a friend of God and willing to undertake all the things that being, that being such a friend and wanting to share that friendship will bring you. You need the courage to speak, to seek the truth, and not to mistake it for your own complacency. You need the, you need finally the charity to discover your own complacencies and your own tendency to self-righteousness, which in fallen human beings, and here’s my Augustinian streak coming out, is very strong believe, you know, that we’re righteously angry about something. Are you really? Are you or are you just self-righteous?

Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you, moving forward, in what ways do you believe theologians can be of greater service to the Church in the years to come? And then perhaps also too, how can the Church be of greater service to theologians?

John C. Cavadini: Well, I think that theologians can be of the greatest service to the Church when they embrace their ecclesial, when they embrace theology as an ecclesial vocation. That means fidelity to the Church. That means uncomfortable terms like obedience and resistance, always questioning yourself, “Am I, am I simply being self-righteous?”

I think it doesn’t mean you don’t try to engage all the theological issues at the greatest depth that you can, seeking to discern the pathway, you might say, to ecclesial fidelity and intellectual excellence both at once. Fidelity to the faith as received and preached in the church. I think I could give you some examples of issues.

One issue that strikes me is do we believe that Jesus Christ is the fullness of revelation, not surpassable, or don’t we? That is what we believe, I think. Have we really done the really deep theological work you need to do to uphold that even as you are upholding the idea that other religions have truth in them? And I think that theologians, I don’t know, I’m going to speak for myself. They tend to veer towards a kind of relativism light, I don’t know, because it seems so sectarian to defend Jesus Christ as the fullness, as, as, as the fullness of revelation unsurpassable. It seems, yeah, that’s what people got killed for.

This is a scandal of particularity. And it’s easier to ease the scandal of particularity than to somehow to, to embrace it and step into it. Um, that’s not the same thing as triumphalism. Triumphalism basically embraces a position and wants others to embrace it because it’s mine. And I want you to be in my club. That’s not really what the Christian faith is all about.

However it’s also not about relativism. And I think that if you look at it this way, what does Christian faith believe? It believes that in Jesus Christ, God has emptied himself. Although he was in the form, form of God, he did not deem equality with God something to grasp at, but emptied himself taking the form of a servant, even to the point of the cross, being obedient. What more can God do than give himself fully, entirely, and completely to us? That’s the truth of the Christian religion. That’s what we believe. God can’t do more than that. No one can do more, not even God, than give themselves completely. So that truth cannot be surpassed, and that revelation cannot be superseded.

And yet, on the other hand, it’s so enormous, it’s so amazing that the Church has all of its existence penetrate more deeply into it, to understand it more deeply in dialogue with other people in dialogue with other religions who have strands of truth in them. They don’t have the fullness of truth in the same way the Christian tradition, Christian faith has it, but they do have truth.

Um, In fact, if one religion doesn’t have the fullness of truth, none of them do or can, it seems to me. But if one does, then all this kind of dialogue becomes possible and meaningful and not as a pathway to relativism or to triumphalism. I think that that domain could be explored a lot more, I don’t know, deeply in a, yeah, than it has been.

Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you very much. Our guest has been John C. Cavadini, Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us

John C. Cavadini: Sure. Thank you. Thank you for listening to me patiently.

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for 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. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.