Reflections on Fides et Ratio
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 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 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.
David Walsh
In natural science, there is also a related boundary-problem connected to human rights. All the legal discussion regarding genetic engineering, the right to be born in a certain way, the right to die — these discussions aren’t just the beginning of a slippery slope on the way to who knows what barbaric practice. Rather, they open up an abyss: the abyss of creating something that will have rights of a certain kind. But that’s an incoherent use of the language of rights which presupposes human beings, and ultimately makes no sense without them. Human beings are of infinite dignity, and any discourse about human rights flows from that dignity, never the other way round.
In the concluding section of Guarded by Mystery, David Walsh explores a second boundary problem posed by modern artists and their art.1 Often in their experience of the anguish of the cry without an answer, these artists are far closer to the radical intersection at the heart of the experience of Jesus than they are aware.
It’s an experience well expressed by Walker Percy:
“If a novelist has a secret, it is not that he has a special something but that he has a special nothing. In this day and age, I think, a serious writer has to be an ex-suicide, a cipher, a naught, zero. Being a naught is the very condition of making anything. That’s the secret.”
“People don’t know that writing well is simply a matter of giving up, of surrendering, of letting go. You say, ‘All is lost. The jig is up. I surrender. I’ll never write another word again. I admit total defeat. I’m washed up.’ What I’m telling you is, I don’t know anything. It’s a question of being so pitiful God takes pity on you, looks down and says, ‘He’s done for. Let’s let him have a couple of good sentences.’”12
For David Walsh, Christianity has the most unblinking clarity about the world we’re in. It’s far less likely to think that the various reforms human beings think up to eliminate corruption, crime, family breakdown, will succeed. Not that there shouldn’t be developed whatever legal and political safeguards possible, just that we shouldn’t lose too much sleep over the periodic failures either. The point is that the world only yields finite satisfactions. Christianity points out that our true fulfillment is in unity with God after death, a fulfillment we work towards seriously but serenely in this vale of tears, enduring all its failures as Christ did.
Walsh’s conclusion is that Christianity is not only indispensable for our eternal salvation, but also for our fulfillment in this life. It’s the most viable sustaining influence in modern civilization, correcting the false absolutes of its understanding of science and human rights. Through the Church, the Christian revelation is the vehicle for divine redemption entering time and redeeming human civilization for eternity. Only by means of the continuing presence of the Divine Word in the third millennium of His Incarnation can human history be guaranteed genuine human progress.
The Third Millennium expands that argument of Fides that the faith of Christianity is essential to reason and the culture of our time, if it is to remain fully human. And, I would add, that interplay between human imperfection seeking perfection, and divine perfection reaching out to human imperfection — at its highest in the Incarnate Word — is also the constitutive reality of human history since the incarnation.
The Common Quest of Humanity
Just after its opening words on faith and reason as the two wings by which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth, Fides widens out the dialogue to the new cultural context within which the Church finds herself at the dawn of the third millennium. This may be seen, perhaps, as the other major focus of the encyclical:
“In both East and West, we may trace a journey which has led humanity down the centuries to meet and engage truth more and more deeply . . . . Moreover, a cursory glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts of the world, with their different cultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I? Where have I come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life?”
“These are the questions which we find in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in the Veda [the foundational Hindu wrtings] and the Avesta [the Zoroastrian texts]; we find them in the writings of Confucius and Lao-Tze, and in the preaching of Tirthankara [Jainism] and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of Homer and in the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles, as they do in the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are questions which have their common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart.” (§1)
The Pope now indicates how the Church both belongs to this common quest of humanity, and has a providential role to play within it:
“The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery — the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is ‘the way, and the truth, and the life.’ It is her duty to serve humanity in different ways, but one way in particular imposes a responsibility of a quite special kind: the diakonia [service] of the truth.” (§3)
This second aspect of Fides poses the question of the underlying framework required for developing our dialogue, not only with the culture of reason, as it emerged in Greek philosophy and Roman law and politics, but with all the other great cultures of human history. The almost two millennia of dialogue with that Greco-Roman world, which continues in terms of the dialogue with non-religious secularism, has for the last few centuries required the enormous expansion mentioned in §1 of Fides.
The Trinitarian Model
The experience of Jesus is rooted in its trinitarian context. We’ve suggested that the integration of the dialogue between faith and reason can be found at its most profound in christological anthropology with the intersection of the two Whys of the Crucified Christ. Now, further, the expansion of that dialogue to universal humanity will be understood at its deepest in terms of a trinitarian anthropology.
The being of each of the persons of the Trinity is eternal dialogue with the other, a dialogue requiring each to become “nothing” in order to allow the other to be. So the radical openness of the Gospel to the dialogue with every culture, in which the Church is reconfiguring herself as the sustaining horizon of the postmodern world,is already mirrored for us in the inner life of God, One and Three.13
That Trinity functions as the model and goal of all our dialogues, as the Russian film director, Andrei Tarkovsky, noted in his commentry on his film, Andrei Rublov. He remarks on the culminating appearance of the painter Rublov’s vision of three mysterious beings who appeared to Abraham, united in an unmoving movement of love in his masterpiece, “Troitsa:”
“At last, here is the ‘Trinity’: great, serene, penetrated completely by a thrilling joy, the source of human brotherhood. The concrete division of one alone into three and the triple union in one alone opens out a wonderful perspective on the future yet to unfold throughout the ages.”14
In these dialogues, we’ll understand that each of the cultural matrices — whether mythic, philosophic, revelational, or the various forms of secularity from modernity to postmodernity — is enriched by the others, even with the need to be purified by the at times immoderate critique of the others. And we’ll understand that unless we’re prepared to reach out to the genuine quest for truth underlying the matrices different from, if not necessarily opposed to ours, we will be impoverished by the disappearance of any of them.15
The Christian Capacity for Cultural Unity
The capacity of Christianity for uniting different cultures in a common civilization has already “unfolded throughout the ages.” In its first millennium, the experience of the Irish missionaries, living, as St. Patrick did, in deep communion with the Trinity, and who were able to reach out in love to every other culture as their own, was not an exception.
This was how a common Christendom developed which was not a world empire of hollowed-out subject peoples. Even today, the Byzantine and Slavic peoples (Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Serbs and Croats), the Germans, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, the Celts and Hungarians – all of them have inherited national cultures which, if not founded by Christian saints, were at least profoundly renewed and reinvigorated by their moments of historic Christian conversion.
Jean Daniélou has well caught the mutual giving and receiving between the Church and the various cultures, when he wrote:
“First. . . the Church is not to be identified with any single race, culture or society; just as Christianity, whose original idiom was Aramaic, absorbed in time the culture of the Hellenes and finally the social structure of Rome, so now the Church must grow to be Chinese in China and Indian in India – all things to all men . . . . But secondly, the Church, in its freedom from any permanent attachment to a particular civilization, derives an imperishable enrichment from each of the cultures with which it is united: and equally – to take a particular example – China can welcome Catholicism, and allow it to take root in Chinese culture, without repudiating the capital value of its existing investment in Latin forms . . . . The true Church is no more Greek or Latin than Chinese or Indian. The Church of the future will have passed through all history and incorporated every variety of human civilization, in order to wear that wedding dress, ‘a robe of rich embroidery’ (Ps.44,15), for the eternal union with the Bridegroom.”6
And in this moment of intersection of every culture of humanity, a moment which cannot be filled by mere economic or political or entertainment internationalisms, we can offer as a genuine “DNA” for a universal humanity, a trinitarian vision and life. But only if, like Jesus, God and Man, we make our painful exodus from our own cultures.
It’s our task to find a way to share our Christian vision at the full height of Fides’ exciting agenda to be the world-culture for a universal humanity, with our non-Christian sisters and brothers, along with those of non-religious convictions. If we do so, then the dynamism and enormous sweep in space and time of trinitarian spirituality will capture not just the imagination, but the heart of younger generations — often longing for a united world — as it captured the hearts of those living in the empty husk of a world-empire without a spiritual substance at the dawn of the first millennium of Christ.
Is it really possible for us to lose ourselves again and again in order to reach out to those of other cultures, particularly those in our own society who have partly or entirely renounced their Christian background? Well, there is one human being who did that so completely that she even won us over! Since the Annunciation, it could be said that she belonged in a special way to the trinitarian culture, with a deep inner relation to the Father, the Holy Spirit, and her Son. Yet, more than anyone, she went ‘outside the camp’ and shared in her Son’s annihilation. By accepting his last request of her, and his own forsakenness, the Desolated One united her will with the Forsaken One, standing by Him on the cross.
With Him, she too underwent a double exodus: by “losing” being the mother of the Messiah, she lost her human role as Flower of Israel. But also, in consenting to “lose her motherhood of God, she shared her Son’s awful experience of exodus from the Trinity, and through that loss became Mother of all humanity. So she can help us to live the Why of human quest intersecting with the Why of divine search that alone fulfills the human spirit. And, by being ready to lose all that’s most human and most divine for the sake of the other, she encourages us to expand our quest to the entire human family. This is why Fides concludes with the reminder that we too should philosophari in Maria, praying that our journey into wisdom, the”‘sure and final goal of all true knowing,” be freed of every hindrance by the intercession of the one who, in giving birth to the Truth and treasuring it in her heart, has shared it forever with all the world. (§108).
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’ 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).
12. Walker Percy, “Writing in the Ruins.” Interview with Robert Cubbage in Notre Dame Magazine. Autumn, 1987, p. 31.
13. Cf. Walsh, The Third Millennium, p. 151.
14. Quoted in Olivier Clément, L’esprit de Soljénistsyne (Paris: Stock, 1974), p. 299.
15. Cf. Chapter 4 in Walsh, The Third Millennium.
16. The Lord of History: Reflections on the Inner Meaning of History. London: Longmans, 1958, p.40ff.
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