The chronicle becomes even more dramatic when examining the second clinical-academic case presented by the speaker: the intellectual tragedy of a teacher who had experienced a severe corrosion of his own faith. We are told the story of a professor who in his youth had been a practicing Catholic, but who over decades of teaching and continuous contact with psychoanalysis and biologicalism had become lukewarm until he lost the direction of his vocation. As a psychologist and neuroscientist, I have observed this catastrophe on countless occasions within psychiatric wards and university chairs: a scientist's theological faith suffers incessant entropic degradation if exposed without defenses to the corrosive solvents of secularized theories without a robust metaphysical armor.
That university professor, already devoid of the spiritual weapons of purified understanding, approached Dr. Verdier in a hallway to ask him a question full of existential anguish and surrender: how do you manage to live with all this. In this question lay the tragic confession of modern immanentism: for those who lack the superior scientific habit, the clinical theories of secular psychology and the truth of Revelation operate in the mind as antagonistic powers that end up disintegrating the inner unity of the researcher. The drama of the lukewarm scientist lies specifically in the lack of the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical habitus that allows the sciences to be ordered hierarchically, distinguishing with crystal clarity between the uncaused First Cause and the second or instrumental causes. When a doctor loses the contemplation of the rational soul as a substantial form and supreme principle of action, the motley multiplicity of empirical techniques becomes a tower of Babel that suffocates his judgment. For this reason, the speaker stated with admirable surgical realism that the supposed dialogues between science and faith in the twentieth century university have been disappointing and sporadic, absolutely lacking a healthy and true integration in the classroom.
In order to illustrate this historical and epistemological disagreement, Dr. Verdier appeals to a secular analogy of great pedagogical fertility: the mechanical workshop. It reminds us that in a carriage or automobile repair shop, operators of dissimilar arts converge, such as the craftsman who applies the exterior paint to the bodywork and the specialist mechanic who calibrates the pistons and gears of the engine. Both workers work simultaneously on the same physical object, greet each other in the patio and share bread at the communal table during the break; however, their disciplines remain perfectly juxtaposed and separate. As a student of theoretical physics, I confirm the accuracy of the example in the inert world: the chromatic optics of paint oxides and the internal thermodynamics of a combustion engine do not require melting for the vehicle to circulate.
However—and herein lies the expositor's superior success—the analogy of the mechanical workshop is totally inadequate to describe the ontological constitution of the human being. In an artificial machine, the color of the paint and the mechanics of the engine are accidents superimposed externally by human labor. In man created in the image of God, however, the organic body and the spiritual soul are not two contiguous substances, but rather constitute a single substantial and indivisible hylemorphic union in earthly existence. By virtue of this ontological unity of the human compound, the priest who cares for spiritual health and the psychiatrist who treats emotional ailments cannot limit themselves to eating together at a table of interdisciplinary dialogue, keeping their knowledge compartmentalized; They imperatively require an organic integration in the truth.