Dr. Christopher S. Morrissey
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Redeemer Pacific College
Specialist in Philosophical Theology
Including the Medieval Latin Philosophy of Thomas
Aquinas and His Commentatorial Tradition
"It is because the contemporary alternatives seem so one-sided and are not more evidently solutions to the problems which Thomas faced, and partly solved, that we return to him and to the tradition of theology and philosophy in which his Summa Theologiae appears: theology as the science of the first principle and this as the total knowledge of reality in its unity." -- Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself (Oxford University Press, 1987), p.159.
My primary research interest is philosophical theology, an inquiry that first began, as Eric Voegelin has observed, with Hesiod and Plato's monotheistic explorations. Philosophical theology is the grand adventure of human reason that explores how science enriches theology — an intellectual quest that Voegelin has described as "noetic differentiation". For me, this inquiry obtains its indispensable historical context from the study of the philosophy of nature tradition, especially within scholasticism. Throughout its history, scholasticism cultivated an interdisciplinary, intercultural enterprise that is traditionally referred to as metaphysics. But Benedict Ashley, O.P. has observed that this enterprise would today be better called meta-science, since it coordinates the truths discovered in all the modern sciences, not just in physics.
An example of an area of controversy, to which a meta-scientific analysis can render an invaluable mediation, would be the contributions of biological science to a theological understanding of the historical existence of Adam. In this case and in similar cases, meta-science in our day is called to build upon traditional metaphysics with "applied metaphysics", as W. Norris Clarke describes in his article, "Metaphysics as Mediator Between Revelation and the Natural Sciences," Communio: International Catholic Review 28, no. 3 (2001): 464–87. Indeed, Benedict Ashley in The Way toward Wisdom, p.440, describes this task as "the most radical change" required "in present university education and in our culture": namely, "a rethinking of the foundations of natural science."
Philosophically, I am especially interested in how phenomenology "can help restore the understanding of being and mind that was accepted in classical Greek philosophy and medieval thought and can still take into account certain contributions of modernity, especially those of science" (as Robert Sokolowski put it). Still, one must constantly keep in mind how "phenomenology needs metaphysics" and how "a fully rounded philosopher must do both", as W. Norris Clarke puts it on page 570 of his "John Paul II: The Complementarity of Faith and Philosophy in the Search for Truth," Communio: International Catholic Review 26, no. 2 (1999): 557–570. (Cf. Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, p.186, p.263, and p.290.)
The meta-scientific enterprise of metaphysics was inspired by Plato and is also classically exemplified in St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas. But it first became rigorous when Aristotle established it by examining the philosophy of nature as the foundational part of natural science. Similar rigor may be found in the Thomistic commentatorial tradition, especially in John of St. Thomas, the commentator in whom I have a special interest, because it is from the logic and the philosophy of nature of John of St. Thomas that we may trace a foundational doctrine of signs for the interdisciplinary field of semiotics. (On semiotics, cf. Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, pp.51–2, 296–7.)
In connection with ongoing contemporary inquiry into the philosophy of nature, I am a certified member of the Institute for Advanced Physics. Currently, I am working on a book that integrates scholastic wisdom into the contemporary study of philosophy. On such study, see the Vatican's "Decree on the Reform of Ecclesiastical Studies of Philosophy" (Jan 28, 2011). A large part of my Aristotelian-Thomistic studies have focused on Aquinas' commentaries on the natural philosophy of Aristotle's Physics. But my doctoral dissertation made a semiotic study of mimetic theory and generative anthropology, in order to evaluate René Girard's hypothesis concerning the origin of the human species.
With all these researches, my purpose has been to help maintain the perennial philosophy of St. Thomas as a living tradition. (Perhaps this could be called "Ressourcement Thomism".) But however a scholar may be oriented within a tradition, I believe that scholar has a duty to be fully engaged with the very best of the latest interdisciplinary, intercultural thinking (e.g., on semiotics). In connection with my study of modeling systems theory as the best current semiotic framework on offer, I also have an active side interest in Gregorian semiology, and I am a founding member of the Ianua Coeli Schola Cantorum and I am on the Board of Directors of the Gregorian Institute of Canada.
These diverse interests may make me difficult to categorize. I am classically trained in Greek and Latin and I like to translate ancient Greek and Latin poetry in my spare time. Perhaps it is best to regard me then simply as some sort of Renaissance man. I suppose that I am part of what Ralph McInerny has described in his book Aquinas (Polity Press, 2004) as "a new generation of freelance Thomists"; we are "autodidacts rather than disciples" and "there is something like a secret handshake by which the scattered devotees acknowledge one another" (p.150). Accordingly, I am a proud member of both the Canadian and the American Jacques Maritain Associations. Here's a picture of Ralph signing a copy of his book for me:
