The End of Debate

Debate is an essential part of the academic experience at a Christian university. But, I would contend, that we should not debate for debate's sake. A Christian academic practice that employs disputation must do so within a certain moral practice and with a particular intent to develop key habits of reasoning. We debate with certain short and long-term goals in mind. The Aristotelian concept of phronesis, or practical reasoning, has formed the nucleus of some significant twentieth-century reflection on the nature of moral reasoning and virtue, and it provides a good model of what we should be trying to achieve.

Phronesis is concrete; it is not theoretical generalization; instead, it works itself out anew in each new practical set of circumstances. Phronesis operates on a case-by-case basis not in the pure realm of theory but with a sense of this is what the situation calls for. However, it is not just an internalized set of thinking skills. It is more like a habit of interpretation based on a long formed practice. It is a virtue, which as Augustine pointed out, "is a good habit consonant with our nature."

We form phronesis through practice, and this requires a concrete pattern within which to do so. Thomas Aquinas further defines a virtue as,

An operative habit essentially good, as distinguished from vice, an operative habit essentially evil. Now a habit is a quality in itself difficult of change, disposing well or ill the subject in which it resides, either directly in itself or in relation to its operation. An operative habit is a quality residing in a power or faculty in itself indifferent to this or that line of action, but determined by the habit to this rather than to that kind of acts. Virtue then has this in common with vice, that it disposes a potency to a certain determined activity; but it differs specifically from it in that it disposes it to good acts, i.e. acts in consonance with right reason (Summa 2.55.2).

In other words, virtues are a) good habits that predispose us to good actions and b) represent a certain mature good quality made resident in a person. For Aquinas the cardinal virtue of prudentia is the habitual judgment of how best to respond in ever new circumstances. Education is about cultural, intellectual, and moral prudentia. An education that fails to translate into life's new circumstances is a failure of ultimate phronesis. So we debate in order to learn how to size up situations and circumstances in our pursuit of truth, not to simply win debates.

What, then, is the structure of reasoning and faith? Do we reason our way into faith per se? John Henry Newman argued in The Grammar of Ascent that we begin not by reasoning but by apprehending the object, which then gains our assent. We only later begin to unpack the implied details of what we have given our assent to. We often believe what we cannot understand and what we cannot exhaustively comprehend or prove. Conviction is something we all grow into over time.

This says much about Christian education. We do not reason our way to faith; we begin with its assumptions (ala' Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum--faith seeking understanding). Concrete reasonings are not ultimate tests, but they are sufficient tests in practical reasoning. In other words, we often begin with certain convictions that we have received through revelation, church tradition, ecclesiastical authority, and so on. These are worked out through disputation. They are sized up within classic and new scenarios alike.

Newman divides forms of assent into two types: notional assent, which includes profession, credence, opinion, presumption, and speculation; and real assent, which is imaginative certainty given to what we experience in the real world. Beliefs in what the Church teaches are forms of assent both notional and real. Thus, we gain certitude--a state of mind--all the time by directing ourselves and giving ourselves towards particular truths, and this lived involvement with the object of our assent gives our certitude a quality of irreversibility.

Christian education operates as a way of reinforcing the Christian faith, not by an unquestioning repetition of only certain denominational dogmas, but by a debated, thick ecumenism practiced in true covenant community. We all have an illative sense, a faculty of theoretical reasoning that judges the validity of inferences in much that same way that our prudence (prudentia, phronesis) judges life practically. This theoretical faculty includes a sense of judging what authorities we can give our trust to.

All good reason, if you will, is based on some measure of faith, and all true faith has some measure of rationality in it. Christian education understands this truth. Our warranted presuppositions frame and proceed from our faith; they are also applied and strengthened in the course of debate.