FAITH DEFENDS REASON
NEUHAUS, RICHARD JOHN
FAITH DEFENDS REASON by Richard John Neuhaus TWENTY YEARS AGO, Karol Wojtyla was elected John Paul II. "Be not afraid!" he declared in his first homily as pope, addressing himself not only to...
...Philosophy should resume its dignity and duty in asking the really big questions about the meaning of good and evil, life and death, and why there is anything rather than nothing...
...Many say that we are on the edge of a worldwide resurgence of religious faith, and they may be right, but the pope says we should not welcome that prospect if it is not one of faith and reason working hand in hand to restore the dignity of human persons in their capacity to know the truth...
...Augustine: "Believing is nothing other than to think with assent...
...Father Richard John Neuhaus, a priest of the archdiocese of New York, is editor in chief of First Things...
...If faith does not think, it is nothing...
...Fides et Ratio is an audacious intellectual proposal...
...It is that dimension of this remarkable figure that is brought to the fore in a new encyclical issued on October 15, the twentieth anniversary of his pontificate...
...It unreasonably imprisoned reason within a too-constricted belief about what reason can know...
...True philosophy is born in wonder and directed to transcendent truth...
...Any suggestion that faith is not subject to rational analysis is a disservice to faith and to the universality of truth...
...Less appreciated, then and now, is that John Paul is a philosopher...
...Religion today, including Christianity, still needs that contribution of philosophy...
...One theme of Fides et Ratio is a defense of human reason, its orientation to truth and its capacity to know the truth...
...Enlightenment rationalism, so despised by today's postmodernists, at least believed that there was a truth that could be known for sure...
...John Paul cites St...
...The intimate and necessary friendship between philosophy and theology flourished for centuries, the pope contends, until the rise of the university in the late Middle Ages, and later the Enlightenment, began to pit faith and reason against each other...
...The ancient Greeks and the great thinkers of the Christian intellectual tradition were right: Reason can know the good, the true, and the beautiful, even if it can never know completely or perfectly...
...But the philosophy that is needed, says the pope, cannot be closed to "the horizon of the absolute" that is provided by divine revelation...
...The new encyclical is more comprehensive and audacious than those earlier statements...
...The First Vatican Council (1869-70) affirmed that human reason can know the existence of God, and Leo XIII in 1879 (Aeterni Patris) proposed St...
...That he was a Pole, that he was young (for a pope), that he was an athlete and photogenic and a master of the media—all these things were much remarked at the time...
...In a close-knit argument of more than 25,000 words, John Paul contends that modern philosophers have lost their nerve...
...Philosophy needs such a recovery, and so does religion...
...This revealed truth, the argument continues, provides the "horizon" and "stimulus" for human reason to venture boldly into the far reaches of reality, confident that its pursuit of truth is not in vain...
...The encyclical also offers a strong critique of "fideism...
...he declared in his first homily as pope, addressing himself not only to Christians but to the whole of humanity...
...Voltaire would be astonished, Hume confounded, Kant curious, and Quine incredulous that, after all their labors, the world's most influential champion of human reason should turn out to be none other than the bishop of Rome...
...The alternative is a shriveled and timorous philosophy that with "false modesty" denies its capacity to really know much about anything worth knowing...
...Such false modesty, ironically, paves the way for the hubris of instrumental reason and "scientism," which, in turn, invites the triumph of technology over truth and ends up in a nihilistic subjection of what is human to the caprice of fate and Nietzsche's "will to power...
...If John Paul is critical of the missteps of theology and philosophy in past centuries, he is equally critical of current intellectual enthusiasms that denigrate human reason and the possibility of knowing the truth...
...Theology denigrated the capacity of reason, and philosophy denigrated the possibility of revelation, to the impoverishment of theology and philosophy alike...
...Here, at the end of the twentieth century, on the threshold of the third millennium, after the depredations of Enlightenment rationalism and reactions to it, comes a ringing defense of the capacity of the human mind to seek and know what John Paul dares to call the truth...
...The problem with that rationalism, Fides et Ratio argues, is that it was not rational enough...
...Some might think it impossibly ambitious in its reach...
...Believers are also thinkers: in believing they think and in thinking they believe...
...Many religious thinkers welcome "postmodern" and "multiculturalist" theories because they presumably give religion "a place at the table," as one possible truth among other possible truths in a world where there finally is no truth...
...We are still living with that unhappy legacy in which faith and reason, theology and philosophy, belief and knowledge, metaphysics and science, are viewed as separate worlds, with each having little or no use for the other...
...Among philosophers, theologians, scientists, thinking believers and nonbelievers alike, it should provoke reflection and argument for many years to come...
...The fault for this tragic divorce between faith and reason, John Paul says, lies with both theologians and philosophers...
...Thomas Aquinas as the model for synthesizing philosophy and theology...
...The document, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), powerfully argues a simple proposition: Be not afraid of human reason...
...John Paul, however, believes that giving up on ultimate truth is too high a price to pay for a place at the postmodernist table...
...The Church, John Paul insists, must be the defender and servant of human reason because the Church bears the message that the Word—the ultimate reason or logos of all reality—became human in Jesus Christ...
...Even within the Catholic Church, Fides et Ratio is notable as the first major teaching document devoted to faith and reason in more than a hundred years...
...One of the contributions of ancient Greek philosophy was to use reason to cleanse religion of superstition and mythology...
...The reconciliation of faith and reason is essential, says the pope, because there is finally only one truth, and there is finally only one truth because the source and end of simply everything is one, namely, the God of Israel, who Christians believe is incarnate in space and time...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 7
