Piscatores?

Why “piscatores”? Briefly, I was reading the book God of Jesus Christ by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, and he quoted an early bishop as saying that he and his brother bishops tried to act as “piscatorie et non Aristotelice,” translated as “fishermen and not philosophers.”
This quote struck me as particularly apt for the title of my blog. Having studied philosophy and being partial to it, I have to remind myself that the Faith is greater than the merely philosophical. Naming my blog Piscatores seemed to be a way to keep myself on the straight and narrow, a useful corrective to my natural tendency.

Why plural? Well, that’s where you come in.


Oh, and if someone cites this to me in a comment on something philosophical I’ve posted, I will hunt him down and end him. I brook no insubordination!





More info, for those so inclined:

Here’s the passage that struck me in the book.

…After the Council of Chalcedon (451), Emperor Leo I asked the bishops what they thought of the decisions taken by this assembly. Thirty-four replies, bearing the signatures of about 280 bishops or monks, have survived in the so-called Codex Encyclius. One of the bishops whose words are recorded sums up the spirit of the entire document when he says that the bishops sought to answer “piscatorie et non Aristotelice”, like fishermen, not like philosophers. These words could just as well have been said by one of the conciliar fathers at Nicea, since they perfectly describe the attitude that inspired the bishops in their fight against the temptations of Arianism. They were not interested in the questions of scholars, twisting around in an ever more refined subtlety. They were interested in the simple point that got lost to view behind such questions: they were interested in the simple basic questions of simple people. The panorama of academic reflection is in continual flux, but these basic questions have an enduring character, since the fundamental structure of human relatedness, the simple center of man’s existence, is always the same. The nearer our questions come to this center, the more they lie in the very heart of what it is to be a man, and the simpler they are, the less it is possible to declare them obsolete.
“Piscatorie, non Aristotelice”: Must we not then ask who this Jesus really was?...

“Who was Jesus?” is a “fisherman’s question”, not a problem of philosophical ontology alien to us today. …
It is only if Jesus was God, only if God became man in him, that something actually took place in him….
Precisely this Being is the tremendous event on which everything depends….

----Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), The God of Jesus Christ




Additionally, it seems that St. Ambrose said it first, and it became something of a saying.



Not philosophers but fishermen, not masters of dialectic but tax-gatherers, now find credence.
---- St. Ambrose