Revisiting Books Long Since Read 18 - Dr Stephen J. Costello

Stephen J. Costello The Irish Soul in Dialogue, Liffey Press, 2001 (See Liffey Press)

In this post, while I wish to review Dr Costello’s book, I will also examine briefly the importance of the questioning spirit, and ponder how healing this very spirit can be.  This book is the transcript of interviews the philosopher-author had with Irish cognoscenti on what they felt we might mean by the word “soul” in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Ireland.  The author's compilation of names is eclectic, and it includes, among others, Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, monk/philosopher Mark Patrick Hederman O.S.B., novelist Roddy Doyle, and Ireland’s Cardinal Desmond Connell, long since retired. Each questioning involves, at an intimate level, a questing after something for nobody is completely at home in himself or his world. The personalities encountered in these pages, with their passions and prejudices, will inspire, interest and intrigue.  In short this is a questioning and questing book.  However, please remember that it is from 2001 and may be a bit contextually dated, yet, needless to say, the questioning and questing are perennial.

When we first went to college in 1976 at the tender age of 18 we were all full of questions, and we really did ask them.  I remember the Director of Mater Dei Institute, Rev. Dr. Paddy Wallace (1930 – 2004) saying that he preferred his graduates to leave college with more questions than answers.  I often remember his quipping, "You may not end up with a good answer.  You may end up with a better question."  This approach I loved because he certainly did not give hard and fast answers.  In many senses, Paddy was years ahead of his time.  He had a greater delight in wonder and mysticism than in devotion and doctrine.  Hence I always felt at home with his take on religion, church, spirituality and life.  He was a seeker and searcher, not an oracle of hard and fast answers.  We were taught to think things through for ourselves and arrive at our own synthesis of faith - whatever that might be.  Over the last thirty years my own approach to spirituality has moved on light years from what it was then.  Who knows if I get the time, the energy or even the interest I might right an account of that progress here some day?

As regards the healing question I wish to return to discuss the approach to philosophy of Professor Richard Kearney - my favourite Irish philosopher who is one of the interviewees in Dr. Costello’s rather interesting book.  Richard is both a brilliant writer and a brilliant lecturer.  Few, I have found, could do both so well.  Here is Richard on what philosophy means:

Primarily philosophy to me means a questioning rather than an answering.  It means inviting students to think for themselves and to question, rather than providing them with solutions.  It is not ideology, it is not theology; it is a way of getting students to enquire in a socially committed and personally involved fashion.  It is exposing them to a variety of different currents of thought.  The Irish Soul in Dialogue, Liffey Press, 2001, 139-140)

There is much wisdom in this definition here.  Kearney repeats almost verbatim what Paddy Wallace felt even theology should do.  I also love the fact that any approach to philosophy should insist that the students think for themselves.  This has always been my approach even in secondary teaching. I remember one brilliant lecturer, who was director of my master's thesis in philosophical theology, Dr. Brian McNamara, S.J., who, having given me a rather long list of books to peruse for our next appointment, said,"Now, I don’t want to know what Rahner or Lonergan or Schillebeeckx think; I want to know what you think!” I have always been lucky in my educational mentors and directors. 

Another marvellous lecturer I had was Rev. Dr. Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J. whose meditation site can be accessed by a link on the right of this blog page.  Michael Paul was and is a gentle, refined, spiritual and erudite lecturer.  I rate him among the best communicators I ever had over periods spent in four colleges.  He was and is equally at home in theology, philosophy and literature.  He has spent many years in dialogue with culture in all its facets, and especially with unbelief under its many guises from practical to theoretic atheism, from rigid scepticism to blander agnosticism and out to materialism and indifferentism.  I remember his saying that if Institutes like Mater Dei did their job well they should produce atheists and agnostics as well as people who were deeper believers than when they first started.  In other words, Michael Paul also subscribes to getting people to think out their faith stance or life stance or whatever.  Now back to our man Richard Kearney.

Richard comes from a family tradition of medicine stretching back generations.  Healing of body and soul was always important, he tells us, in his family.  In a way, philosophy belongs, he believes, to a healing tradition as well as does medicine:

I would like to think philosophy is another kind of healing, which involves the psyche... I have always thought of philosophy as a therapy for the soul, beginning with the Greeks... My uncles were obstetricians and gynaecologists.  In a way philosophy is another kind of midwifery, but this time of questions and answers - allowing the birth of answers by putting questions to somebody.  It's a kind of psychic obstetrics.  So, maybe medicine and philosophy aren't completely disconnected.  Certainly, my family's approach to medicine always involved the person as much as the anatomy...There was a recognition that medicine involved the mind as well as the body, even though we are focusing on the mind - it's a therapy of the mind, as Wittgenstein put it.  Philosophy is a form of therapy, and asking questions and discovering which questions can be answered appropriately and which can't...So what attracted me to philosophy?  It was the possibility of finding healing and maybe in time helping to give healing through the profession of philosophy by helping people to ask questions about their lives and to try to answer them and if there are no answers, you go the way of faith or acceptance or letting go or endurance or patience or abandonment. (pp. 140 – 141)

You will see immediately from the above-quoted paragraph Kearney's emphasis on the healing of philosophy, on its being essentially a therapy of the soul or a therapy of the mind according to Wittgenstein.  He repeats this factor again and again in his interview.  In this sense one could, of course, say that philosophy is quite akin to psychotherapy.  The last sentence in Kearney's response above is very important I feel.  I love that he sees philosophy as practical and human - in no way just a matter for drawing rooms of old or fashionable clubs or universities.  It helps people to ask questions that are important about and in their lives; it even helps when there are no answers because the process of questioning refines the soul as it were (my words).  There is a variety of possible stances to life when rational answers crumble and any real philosopher must allow for all possible stances, for all possible views on life; some will find answers in religion (faith); others in just accepting life as it is; some in letting go; some in stoicism; some in agnosticism, some in scepticism and some even in atheism.  (In this last sentence I have fleshed out the implications of Kearney's words for my own benefit.)