In Philosophy in Our School of Thought, I cite the six reasons that Brother Francis listed to explain why we must study philosophy. The fourth reason is this: “True philosophy is the handmaid of theology, ancilla theologiae. Without solid philosophic foundations, both piety and morality become superficial, unstable, and ineffective.”
Brother frequently used to warn about the dangers of superficiality, which he considered a nemesis of true wisdom.
As shallow as it is, superficiality comes in different varieties. There is an intellectual superficiality that has the veneer of knowledge while lacking any depth. Words from “smart people” can be parroted, but, without a firm foundation or deeper rooting in an ordered knowledge of the subject, the learning is only on the very surface. Of such superficiality in the intellect, Alexander Pope famously versified in his “Essay on Criticism”:
A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
The armchair theologian, philosopher, film critic, liturgist, news commentator, etc., specialize in this kind of shallowness. Social media and other online forums are filled with the superficiality Pope here condemns.
Now, unless we are all genuine polymaths deeply read in many fields, we are all superficial in our knowledge of certain things. This is not a moral problem. It might not even be strictly called ignorance, but mere nescience, because ignorance is the deprivation of a knowledge we ought to have. My knowledge of astrophysics is very superficial (if even that), and I somehow do not feel as though this is confessional matter. But my moral state would be altogether different if I pontificated on all things astrophysical considering that what I know of the subject could fit in a thimble with room to spare.
There is also a kind of volitional superficiality that replaces the reason with the emotions (also known as the appetites, feelings, and passions).
Let me explain this.
Since the will is the “rational appetite,” this faculty has the same relationship to our intellect that the passions have to our senses.
In the sense life we have in common with brute animals — with whom we are also called “sentient creatures” — we have the sensitive faculties of cognition, namely, the five external senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell; and the four internal senses (localized organically in the brain) of sense memory, imagination, the cogitative sense, and the so-called common sense (sensus communis), which is not the same as the “common sense” of everyday parlance.
Over and above these cognitive faculties (or knowing powers) is one faculty we do not have in common with the brutes (for they do not have it), but, rather, with angels and even with God Himself: the intellect.
Returning to the level of what we have in common with the beasts, there are appetites that correspond to our sense faculties. These are the passions, which are motions of the concupiscible and irascible powers, and they number eleven: love, hate, desire, aversion, joy, sorrow, hope, despair, daring, fear, and anger. Again, we have these passions in common with the beasts, whom we tend to resemble when we are dominated by our passions, and are thus rightly accused of not acting in accord with reason.
Over and above the concupiscible and irascible faculties — and the passions we experience in them — is one appetitive power we do not have in common with the brutes (for they do not have it), but, rather, with angels and even with God Himself: the will.
If we think of our sensitive appetites being “on the surface” and our rational appetite being “in the depths,” then we can understand why superficiality is condemned by such competent guides as the great Carthusian spiritual writer, Dom François de Sales Pollien (1853-1936), who says this of it in his monumental work, The Interior Life Simplified and Reduced to Its Fundamental Principle:
From the region of ideas and principles we have come down to the right earth of the senses and emotions. In public as in private life, in intellectual as in moral life, we are too often in search of emotions, we live too readily according to the senses. Life tends to become animal, and to be merely a succession of sensations. The deep ways of the mind and heart are more and more unknown; romanticism penetrates everything, even piety.
How, indeed, has sentimentalism perverted piety! It has become attached to the mawkish externals which it adorns with the brightest flowers of pseudo-mysticism, feeding on the disturbing illusions of the senses and hiding from many souls, under deceptive appearances, the absolute emptiness that it conceals so that they often hardly know that they have nothing left but a show of piety, and that they have lost its power. The fascination of trifles has made them lose sight of the deeper good, because they see nothing but seductive superficiality.
For this great spiritual master — who died in 1936, mind you, decades before the sexual revolution and more recent evils — the superficiality he so poignantly describes leads to an ignorance of the depths of true supernatural life, a lessening of our souls, a division whereby our activities lack a fundamental spiritual unity, and, finally, a weakness that puts us in a wretched state.
The prophets of the Old Testament frequently condemned the superficiality of the Israelites in their religious observances:
- Isaiah 1:11-17: “To what purpose do you offer me the multitude of your victims, saith the Lord?… Offer sacrifice no more in vain: incense is an abomination to me… your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evil of your devices from my eyes: cease to do perversely, learn to do well: seek judgment, relieve the oppressed…”
- Osee 6:6: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice: and the knowledge of God more than holocausts.” (Our Lord cites this passage in Matthew 9:13.)
- Amos 5:21-24: “I hate, and have rejected your festivities: and I will not receive the odour of your assemblies… But judgment shall be revealed as water, and justice as a mighty torrent.”
- Jeremiah 4:4: “Be circumcised to the Lord, and take away the foreskins of your hearts, ye men of Juda, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem…”
Dom François de Sales contrasts superficial piety with the genuine coin when he compares an authentic interior life to the Biblical image of the “Root of Jesse” (Isaias 11:1): “It has a root, which is reason; a rod, which is faith; and a flower, which is the spiritual life.” Divine grace is necessary to make the rod of faith spring from the root, and the flower of an authentic supernatural piety to bloom from the rod. To neglect the primacy of grace here is to become a Pelagian.
Now, while grace does indeed assist us in our sensitive life — principally, by helping us to restrain and direct our passions according to reason— the primary effects of actual grace are to enlighten the intellect and to strengthen the will.
The superficial person is sadly inclined to take the powerful motions of his passions as convictions in the will. The ultimate destination of this journey, if uncorrected, is derangement here and hell hereafter.
The alternative is an intellect informed by the light of faith and a will that acts in accordance with that light, shunning all those impulses of the passions that run contrary to the light of faith.
To help us avoid superficiality, let us recall that Saint Thomas Aquinas says that the goodness of an act resides fundamentally in the will. What the will intends — its object — is what determines the goodness (or lack thereof) of the act. As Monsignor Glenn summarizes it, “Moral good and moral evil are primarily in the will. Human acts performed externally under command of the will, take their morality, first and foremost, from the will itself.”
Now, this does not contradict the fact that there are acts which are malum in se (evil in themselves), and no amount of good will can alter that fact. But the primacy of the goodness of the act springs from the will — which Holy Scripture sometimes calls “the heart” — and it is this which we must purify of evil intention. Even an objectively good act done for an evil intention is evil.
If we conform our wills to reason and the divine law, we are doing the right thing.
But note, reason and the divine law are rooted in man’s higher faculties, not in the senses, and not in the emotions. The will, which is a “blind faculty,” cannot act according to reason and divine law unless our intellect itself knows that law. Hence, the need for instruction, spiritual reading, and meditation.
For a “deep dive” into an authentic anti-superficial spirituality, I think you can do no better than slowly and meditatively reading Dom François de Sales’ excellent book.
There is a worse kind of volitional superficiality, which is not merely superficial, but which malignantly and cunningly replaces the deep things that are true, good, and beautiful with a kind of lying veneer. This is the hypocrisy of the Pharisees:
- Matthew 23:25-28: “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you make clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but within you are full of rapine and uncleanness… You are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful, but within are full of dead men’s bones, and of all filthiness. So you also outwardly appear to men just; but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”
- Mark 7:6-8: “And he answering, said to them: Well did Isaias prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrines and precepts of men. For leaving the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men.”
Our Lord condemns these superficial hypocrites for observing the externals of the law while ignoring its very heart: “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you tithe mint, and anise, and cummin, and have left the weightier things of the law; judgment, and mercy, and faith. These things you ought to have done, and not to leave those undone” (Matt. 23:23).
This kind of superficiality is certainly not something limited to Our Lord’s time. In the Church today, we hear from many doctors of the law about obedience and Canon Law — two genuine goods which these “blind guides” divorce from the Deposit of Faith and weaponize against those who strive to practice a genuine “obedience of faith” (Rom. 16:26). Sadly, there are good people who are so superficial, perhaps for want of formation, that they lack prudent discernment and fall for the trick.
Brother Francis was right. Superficiality is a nemesis of true wisdom.
