from the Irish Navigator

The Reunion of Faith and Reason in Our Time  -Pt 1

Reflections on Fides et ratio
 

             by Brendan Purcell

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Emeritus Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin, Ireland. He is currently engaged in pastoral work in Sydney, Australia and has been appointed visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. He is editor of Hitler and the Germans, Vol 31 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has a book forthcoming on human origins. This article is adapted from a 2005 lecture delivered to the Atlantis Society, University College Dublin and appears in 2 parts.

On this occasion we will consider the Encyclical Letter of John Paul II, Faith and Reason ( Fides et ratio), which he released on September 15th, 1998. We will begin with a few introductory remarks on the cultural context for the encyclical and then consider two of its aspects.

It is obvious that Faith and Reason (hereinafter “FIDES”) addresses the crisis of contemporary Western culture, a crisis marked by a yawning emptiness that still idolizes individual reason and individual autonomy. It is a disillusioned, deconstructed culture, where many, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction,’¹ get seriously lost in various divertissements.

But that is not all there is to it. Alongside this loss of confidence in autonomy, whether of the individual, of science, of legal and political rights, even of art, there is also the excitement of widening  horizons in space and time. So that now we are able to be in contact with every contemporary culture, along with all those cultures found in human history going back to the paleolithic, some 50,000 years ago.

And both of these factors — (1) the consciousness that we belong to a worldwide civilization of reason which has lost its way, and (2) that there is the possibility and challenge of growing enormously if we can find a way to reawaken the common humanity we share with people of every other background, culture, and religion, or moral conviction — are part of the cultural background to FIDES. Written at the end of the second millennium, and taken with other writings of the Pope, it is a proposed intellectual foundation for the third millennium. How? Let’s go back to the beginnings of the first and second Christian millennia.

The Incarnation of the Word (He who founded the Church) and the Church’s struggle to enter into the public life of humanity marked the first millennium of Christ. If the Roman empire was an imperial husk without spiritual substance, for that very reason, huge numbers of its members welcomed Christianity as providing that substance. Of course Christianity aimed at more than the mere temporary stabilization of a world empire. It was aiming at a transformation of our life in time by focusing on our life beyond time. In what Eric Voegelin sees as the basis for a theology of history, this focus was expressed in Augustine’s phrase, ‘Incipit exire qui incipit amare,’ ‘he begins to leave [the City of Man], who begins to love’ [which is the passport to the City of God].²

Early in the second millennium, mystic philosophers and theologians like Anselm, Thomas, and Bonaventure, among others, developed an intellectual synthesis of nature and grace, of reason and faith, of created and uncreated being. Aquinas differentiated the activity of human reason from that of a reason enlightened by revelation. In the context of his History of Political Ideas, Voegelin remarks:

It is no exaggeration to say that the authority of Thomas and his superb personal skill in achieving the harmonization [between the spheres of reason and of faith] for his time have decisively influenced the fate of scholarship in the Western World. He has shown in practice that philosophy can function in the Christian system and that revealed truth is compatible with philosophy; and he has formulated the metaphysical principle that gives philosophy its legitimate status in Christianity.³

That philosophical and theological synthesis entered into the intellectual fabric of what we know as Christendom, extending into the high Middle Ages.