In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place ; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

—John McCrae

The battle of Passchendaele, which McCrae’s poem commemorates, offers us an apt analogy for the landscape of Catholic thought during much of the past thirty years. In those rainy days of 1917, the fields of Flanders were the worst possible place for a battle, and the tactics employed there were the worst possible tactics : bombing the lowlands with heavy artillery turned them into a murderous muddy mire, a veritable "Passion dale" for the men who fought there. By the time it was over the British had lost more men in those fields than in any other battle in their history as a people. [1]

Yet, the remarkable thing was how Britain’s leaders failed to recognize the peril they were in ; they failed to see what any young officer in the field knew : that the battle should have been pursued elsewhere and that other tactics should have been employed.

How well this describes the battles of the Catholic mind these recent years. We have been mired in fights about law and who has authority to make it and who should obey it ; about rules and exceptions to them. And too often the tactics we have employed have been enfilades of heavy bombast and acrimony. All this has bogged us down and has left many a young person mired in a viscous mental ooze of bad ideas and confusion.

What many have failed to recognize is that although these issues are important, they are not the battle we should now be fighting, nor are these the tactics we should be employing. These issues are important, but we cannot address them fruitfully until we recognize more clearly the landscape in which we now find ourselves, and until we change our tactics. Fides et Ratio, I would like to suggest, is a call by the Pope for us to recognize the landscape, and to employ new tactics.

The field in which we now find ourselves is the dry ground of our young people’s thirst for meaning. The ground is hard and students are thirsty because many of the intellectual denizens that inhabit the post-modern landscape are telling our students that there is no meaning : that meaning is merely ideology, that truth is merely a construct of the powerful to control the weak. The dry winds of this teaching lead many into a desert of despair, a desert reminiscent of the early days of this century. I am keenly aware that we are gathered here under the auspices of the Maritain center. In the early years of this century, Raissa Maritain was a young college student eager for truth.

"It was already an immense joy to know that others besides myself had sought truth and had not scorned to devote their lives to that search. How many treasures had revealed themselves to the activity of the human intelligence ! I thought that one day among them all I would find my own treasure—absolute truth, unshakable truth ! I should know the meaning of life and the truth about God." [2]

Yet, here is how she describes her teachers at the Sorbonne during those same years.

"They despaired of truth, whose very name was unlovely to them and could be used only between the quotation marks of a disillusioned smile." [3]

The result was that she and Jacques gradually descended into despair. Here’s how she describes it.

"We swam aimlessly in the waters of observation and experience like a fish in the depths of the sea, without ever seeing the sun whose dim rays filtered down to us. . . . And sadness pierced me, the bitter taste of the emptiness of a soul which saw the lights go out, one by one." [4]

That was their Passchendaele, and it was as veterans of that spiritual field of battle that they dedicated their lives to understanding the relationship between the human intellect and the life of faith. Jacques and Raissa were able to undertake this vocation because they encountered the person of Christ. In the desert of their despair, Christ spoke to them and refreshed them, giving them strength for the journey. I suspect that if Jacques and Raissa could speak to us who are tying to understand the relationship between faith and reason, they would call us to remember the centrality of Christ ; they would invite us to ask Christ in the Eucharist for his help and strength, for it is only in him that we will find the strength to undertake our task.

The Maritains struggled and they have passed this struggle onto us. Although they are not buried in Flanders but in Kolbsheim, with little adjustment they could speak the words of the poem to us as well.

Take up our quarrel with the foe :
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch ; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Kolbsheim’s fields.

Michael Sherwin, O.P.