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.

 

 

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

 

 

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