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A Christological Union of Faith and Reason
How can a Christian unite faith and reason? The opening words of FIDES, which are also those most quoted, already suggest an answer:
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
The emphasis of the encyclical is that our culture needs not faith alone or reason alone, as in that separation which has marked and marred modern culture, but for their reintegration.
One way of understanding philosophy (which stands for the "reason" aspect of our existence) is to see in it man’s search for God. And, drawing on a famous title by Heschel, we can see revelation as an expression of God’s search for man.9 So the task of integrating reason and faith may be understood in terms of the intersection of these two quests.
The first search, of man for God, can be seen at its most profound and most anguished, in Christ. Because, if we try to understand the Why of the Incarnate Word at the moment of his most extreme suffering on earth, when he cried out to the Father, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' we are perhaps touching the quest for truth, hidden in the heart of each human being, at its fullest. In the darkest of dark nights, more than a Nietzsche or a Sartre, Jesus experienced the anguish of a Why without an ultimate answer — an anguish that characterizes what elsewhere the Pope has spoken of as the collective dark night of Western culture.
And what of the second search, God’s search for man? FIDES explicitly refers to the kenosis of God in §93. Because He is incarnate Word, Jesus is also, in his mission as Second Person of the Trinity, God in search of each human being. And that search involves what poor human words have expressed as the dark night of God, in which the Divine Word, plunging towards the abyss of human weakness, in some fashion appears to "lose" His own divinity.
Of course, since there is only the one Person, divine and human, we can say, that in Jesus, both quests, of man for God, and of God for man, coincide.10 And that is perhaps the most profound basis for the unity and complementarity of faith and reason, revelation and philosophy, and the ground for the successful interaction and expansion of both quests. For us, reliving by grace those two Whys of Jesus, the task is to ensure that the civilization of reason (and this century has amply shown the unlimited cruelty of reason without mercy) is grounded by a civilization of love.
Where can we see these Whys meeting in contemporary culture? David Walsh, in his The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason develops FIDES ’ discussion of this necessary intersection of contemporary culture with Christianity.11 He takes an unusual approach towards the modern world. Essential to the modern world’s identity are, for example, the importance of science and of human rights. If Stanley Jaki, building on the writings of the great French historian of science, Pierre Duhem, has done the most to uncover the medieval Christian origins of modern natural science, authors like Harold Berman and Brian Tierney have shown the basis of modern rights theory in the medieval canonists.
For Walsh, the question is whether what emerges from that medieval past can survive outside a Christian context. Most moderns would answer that with a resounding “yes.” For most moderns, natural science and legal and political rights not only can exist in a secular world, but their very claim to legitimacy as the basis for a pluralist culture derives from a denial of their Christian parenthood in the past.
Still, as
The Third Millennium notes, that certainty of autonomy from any religious context is wearing thin for science and rights just now. Science has run into all sorts of problems whenever the various sciences try to go beyond their partial view of reality to speak about the whole. Astronomy and physics are unable to deal with the mystery of creation, biology has its controversies about evolution, neurology runs into the difficulties of consciousness. Because scientists are also human beings, they can’t help peering over the boundaries of their sciences, and wondering where what they’re studying comes from. But the methods of the natural sciences can’t deal with the bigger question of existence. They have to take for granted the mysterious origin of what they can only deal with as given, as data.
[This is part 1 of a two part article. Part 2 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
1. Cf. ‘Burnt Norton,’ in T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 192.
2. The reference to Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 64.2 concludes Eric Voegelin’s essay, ‘Eternal Being in Time’ (in his Anamnesis, tr. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978, p. 140).
3. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Vol. II: The Middle Ages to Aquinas, Ed. Peter von Sivers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 209–10.
4. Weigel, Witness to Hope, p. 848.
5. George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II, New York: HarperCollins, 1999, p. 841.
6. In Rino Fisichella, ‘Introduzione,’ Fides et Ratio: I rapporti tra fede e ragione (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1998), p. 16.
7. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Culture and Truth: Reflections on the Encyclical,’ in Origins, 28, 36 (February 25, 1999), p. 627.
8. Cf. Chiara Lubich, Il Grido (Rome: Città Nuova, 2000); Piero Coda, Evento Pasquale: Trinità e Storia (Rome: Città Nuova, 1984).
9. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Noonday, 1976).
10. Fisichella reminds us that FIDES’s official date of publication is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, a day which celebrates the great Why of Jesus (Fides et Ratio: I rapporti, p. 13)
11. David Walsh, The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999). See also his Guarded by Mystery (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998). For a further discussion of the quest for the divine in some modern artists, see John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
