Faith Seeking Understanding

The full essay is available here as a PDF. 

Saint Anselm of Canterbury called it fides quaerens intellectum  — faith seeking understanding. He meant: begin from a conviction you cannot yet fully prove, and pursue the most rigorous demonstration available. Do not wait for certainty. Commit, and then make the case.

That is what this field has always been doing.

The elder justice field has followed an arc that Saint Anselm would recognize. It began with elder abuse — the naming of a harm that had been invisible, the insistence that what was happening behind closed doors mattered. From elder abuse, the field moved toward elder justice: the recognition that response was not enough, that the conditions producing harm had to be addressed structurally. From elder justice, the field is now moving toward rights — the claim that older adults are rights-bearing persons whose autonomy, voice, and legal standing must be recognized and defended.

That is where the field stands now. And it is where the argument must go next.

But the arc does not end with rights. It cannot. Gödel taught us that any sufficiently powerful formal system contains truths it cannot prove from within its own axioms. Rights are like that. A system built on rights cannot generate, from within its own terms, the foundation that gives rights their force. That foundation is dignity: the irreducible worth of a person that does not depend on their ability to claim it. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights understood this. It does not derive dignity from rights. It places them side by side, as co-original. Dignity is not the conclusion. It is the axiom.

And beyond dignity — reached by the same Anselmian movement, stepping outside the system again — is consciousness. Not consciousness as a clinical category, but as a moral obligation: the commitment to keep looking for the person inside the silence. To treat silence as a question rather than an answer.

Neuroscience now tells us that roughly one in four patients diagnosed as vegetative show evidence of covert awareness. One in four. That is not an edge case. It is a systemic failure. And it is the sharpest possible proof of what consciousness, as a destination, requires: not the acknowledgment of awareness where it is easy to see, but the obligation to look where it is hard.

Saint Anselm began from the conviction that what he sought was real — not as a conclusion reached at the end of the argument, but as the premise from which the argument proceeds. The elder justice field begins from the conviction that every older adult, however silent, however diminished in the eyes of the system, is still there — still a person, still deserving of attention, still within the circle of rights.

That conviction cannot be proven from within the system’s own terms. It has to be argued, defended, and enacted — in legislation, in clinical practice, in courtrooms, in the small acts of attention that are the beginning of everything.

Faith seeking understanding. That is what we are doing here.

Philip C. Marshall is the founder of BeyondBrooke.org and BeyondGuardianship.org and a nationally recognized elder justice advocate. He will deliver the keynote address at the Northern New England Regional FAST (Financial Abuse Specialty Team) Conference on elder abuse and exploitation, presented by FAST of New Hampshire, sponsored by AARP New Hampshire, on June 2, at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College.