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A Spiritually Grounded World-Wide Civilization
Looking back now at the threshold of the third millennium, I would suggest that FIDES was the intellectual expression of John Paul II’s attempt to mark out a path towards a new, spiritually grounded worldwide civilization. He was doing this at a time of even greater need, and also of more fully universal challenge, than existed at the beginning of either the first or the second millennia. Earlier, in the prophetic sign of the 1986 Assisi World Day of Prayer for Peace, he called together leaders of all faiths. That convocation indicated how he saw this new era of dialogue between representatives of most of the world’s religions. As George Weigel has remarked, this event ‘was the most visible expression of John Paul’s conviction that all truth is related to the one Truth, who is God.’4
There had been a precedent to FIDES. Weigel, in his biography of John Paul II, notes that FIDES was the first major statement on the relationship between faith and reason in almost 120 years. The First Vatican Council had taught in 1869–1870 that human beings could know the existence of God through reason, and Leo XIII’s encyclical, Aeterni Patris had proposed the philosophy and theology of Thomas Aquinas as the model for a synthesis of faith and reason. But much had happened in world civilization since the late nineteenth century—not least, philosophy’s drastically diminished confidence in its capacity to know the truth of things.5
Rino Fisichella has suggested that FIDES (on the truth of human existence) and Veritatis Splendor (on the moral life to be led in imitation of Christ) are the two sides of a triptych, with Redemptor Hominis — where the icon of Christ has been painted — at the center.6
In a talk given on the encyclical in California, Benedict XVI, at that time Cardinal Ratzinger, quoted C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, where Screwtape pointed out to the junior demon how educated people can become anaesthetized from the truth by ‘the historical point of view’:
The historical point of view, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books and what phase in the writer’s development or in the general history of thought it illustrates . . .7
In comments he made on the release of FIDES, Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out that the central matter of the encyclical is ‘the question of truth. . .the basic question. . .which spans all eras and seasons of life and of the history of humanity.’ And John Paul II, in a homily on the Sunday after FIDES was presented, said: ‘Woe to humanity which loses the sense of truth, the courage to seek it, and the trust to find it. Not only faith would be compromised by this, but also the very meaning of life.’
It seems to me that in FIDES, the theme of Christ as Truth for all of humanity is developed more than in any previous Church document. John Paul II noted in his Apostolic Letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente that "In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is himself eternal." (§10) FIDES helped us appreciate better how the third millennium of Christ too can become "a dimension of God," a deeper expansion of the Incarnation into the history of universal humanity at this moment of apparent tragic emptiness and exciting challenge.
We now take up the two principal themes of the encyclical: first, the need to bring together faith and reason — the defining and ongoing dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens; and second, the need to extend this dialogue throughout the world. Could we draw those two strands together so that we have a single Christian perspective on problems which could also be appreciated by our countless brothers and sisters on earth motivated by the same quest for truth as are we, but who do not share our faith? Perhaps it can be done if we read FIDES in terms of the kind of kenotic [emptying of the Son in the Incarnation –ed] and a trinitarian hermeneutic developed in the spiritual writings of Chiara Lubich or theologically by, among others, Piero Coda.8
