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“Faith and reason are like two wings
on which the human spirit rises to the
contemplation of truth.” —John Paul II
Fides et Ratio: An exhortation to recover a true metaphysic
By Robert K. Carlson
In 1993 an Italian journalist, Vittorio Messori, asked Pope John Paul II, “Have you ever once hesitated in your belief in your relationship with Jesus Christ and therefore with God? Haven’t you ever had . . . questions and problems . . . about the truth of this Creed which is repeated at each Mass and which proclaims an unprecedented faith, of which you are the highest guarantor?” “Your question,” the Pope responded, “is infused with both a lively faith and a certain anxiety. I state right from the outset: ‘Be not afraid! Of what should we not be afraid? We should not fear the truth about ourselves.’”
In his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, the Holy Father chose, in the twentieth year of his pontificate, 1998, as he had done so often in the past, to encourage once again his Brother Bishops and spiritual children to “be not afraid” to reflect on truth. “Sure of her competence as the bearer of the Revelation of Jesus Christ,” he says, “the Church reaffirms the need to reflect upon truth . . .”(6). More specifically, in his reflection on truth, he exhorts philosophy to recover a true metaphysic — restore its sapiential dimension and true dignity and therefore function as the ancilla fidei.
As we move into the third millennium, what need prompted John Paul, in Fides et Ratio, to pursue the theme of the relationship between faith and reason, and, more particularly, to pursue the discipline of philosophy in man’s journey to discover truth? “I wish to reflect upon this special activity of human reason,” he explains, “because, at the present time in particular, the search for ultimate truth seems often to be neglected”(5).
In the introduction to Fides et Ratio he states that philosophical thinking now tends “to pursue issues — existential, hermeneutical, or linguistic — which ignore the radical question of the truth about personal existence, about being and about God”(5). The pursuit of second-intention questions, to the exclusion of first-intention questions, he argues, is the consequence of “different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread skepticism”(5). Furthermore, he contends that widespread skepticism has filtered down to persons in the street: “Hence we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being’s great capacity for knowledge”(5).
We are, the Holy Father believes, suffering from a metaphysical crisis of truth. This has caused a profound dilemma: if we deny the efficacy of reason to know the truth about real being and God, if there is instead a “widespread distrust of the human being’s great capacity for knowledge,” then how can truth be restored by rational argument? What must or can be done to restore our trust in the natural capacity for knowledge? The Pope, in speaking for the Church, answers that he feels impelled “to bear witness to the truth” because “in reaffirming the truth of faith, we can both restore to our contemporaries a genuine trust in their capacity to know and challenge philosophy to recover and develop its own full dignity”(6).
In this rhetorical challenge, John Paul resorts to the oldest kind of Catholic apologetics — not so much by demonstrative argument as by presentation, by a witness who first testifies and then explains. In imitation of Christ himself, who witnessed the truth of his doctrines “as one having authority,” the Vicar of Christ — as St. Paul, St. Justin, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and many others whom he invokes from the long history of Christian tradition — testifies to the truth of his thesis, which he states in his preliminary greeting: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
The Pope, like a prudent father, eschews polemic. Instead — Cor ad cor loquitur — he invites his spiritual children to consider what he and other witnesses say about the path to truth. This sets the personal tone of the encyclical. He touches the heart, which makes the reason and will of the reader receptive to his words that persuade. Newman, a great convert to the truth, says in a famous essay on faith: “The heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us.”
In this age of anxiety, brought on by our metaphysical crisis of truth, where else might one go to hear the authentic voice of tradition that touches the heart than to the Vicar of Christ, who speaks for the Church and bears witness to the symbiotic relationship between faith and reason, a twofold path to truth?
Fides et Ratio declares that man is continuously on a journey to discover truth. Because he is a spiritual creature made in the image of God and is therefore rational, which constitutes his true dignity as man, he wonders, raises fundamental questions and seeks true answers: Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? and so forth. The core of these questions is the quest for the meaning of life, and here “begins, then, the journey which will lead [man] to discover ever new frontiers of knowledge”(4).
Quoting from the First Vatican Council’s Dei Filius, John Paul clarifies the twofold order of knowledge of faith and reason, “twofold” due to this knowledge having both source and object:
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There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object. With regard to the source, because we know in one by natural reason, in the other by divine faith. With regard to the object, because besides those things which natural reason can attain, there are proposed for our belief mysteries hidden in God which, unless they are divinely revealed, cannot be known(9).
If philosophy, an autonomous science with its own principles and method, truly functions as the ancilla fidei, as the Holy Father claims, then ultimately there can be no essential opposition between the truths of reason and faith. St. Thomas Aquinas contended as much in his conflict with the Averroists, who espoused the theory of the double-truth. The present encyclical, in fact, states that the distinctive contribution the biblical world made to the theory of knowledge is an affirmation of unity between truths of faith and reason:
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“What is distinctive in the biblical text is the conviction that there is a profound and indissoluble unity between the knowledge of reason and the knowledge of faith ”(16).
What guarantees this indissoluble unity but the principle of the unity of truth, grounded in the ontological and logical principle of non-contradiction? These principles, of course, assume the human mind’s ability to know truth, adaequatio rei et intellectus. Being is intelligible. “The unity of truth is a ftindamental premise of human reasoning,” the Pope argues, “as the principle of non-contradiction makes clear. Revelation renders this unity certain. . . . It is . . . the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order . . . and who reveals himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”(34). Ultimately, because God is the source of all being, he is also the source of all ontological and logical truth. It then follows that God, the Creator of the intelligible, natural order and truth, cannot contradict himself — which he would do, were he to reveal a proposition that was true in the supernatural order but false in the natural order. This of course is impossible. Thus the unity or compatibility of truths in the two orders is guaranteed.
Whereas the two orders of knowledge can be distinguished in source and object, they cannot be separated, due to the principle of the unity of truth. This encourages the Holy Father to assert with conviction that faith and reason are integral sources, or wings, on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of its proper object, truth. As the source, the object of truth is likewise twofold: revealed truths are known by the act of divine faith and natural truths are known by reason.
The intimate relationship between revealed and philosophical truth, the Pope avers, creates a fundamental harmony and “imposes a twofold consideration, since the truth conferred by Revelation is a truth to be understood in the light of reason. It is this duality alone which allows us to specify correctly the relationship between revealed truth and philosophical learning.”35
It should now be clear why the entire encyclical is, in one sense, an exhortation to recover a true metaphysic. If the harmony of revealed and natural truth which allows the Holy Father to specify their relationship correctly is dependent upon the principle of the unity of truth, and this principle is grounded in the ontological and logical principle of non-contradiction, metaphysics is absolutely necessary. Why? Because it is the philosophical science that explains and defends these principles, and also explains and defends the ability of the human mind to know objective truth and the definition of truth upon which the harmony of revealed and natural truth depends.
The Pope corroborates this. There is a “need for a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range,” he argues, “capable . . . of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute, ultimate and foundational in its search for truth.”83 Philosophy, he explains, must “verify the human capacity to know the truth, to come to a knowledge which can reach objective truth by means of that adaequatio rei et intellectus to which the Scholastic Doctors referred”(82).
Furthermore, he contends, metaphysics is also necessary to the whole enterprise of theology — the science of revealed truth — as well: “A theology without a metaphysical horizon could not move beyond an analysis of religious experience, nor would it allow the intellectus fidei to give a coherent account of the universal and transcendent value of revealed truth”(83).
This metaphysic, of course, must be true, because, as Jacques Maritain explains, “the theologian . . . makes use at every turn of philosophic propositions to prove his own conclusions. Therefore a system of theology could not possibly be true if the metaphysics which it employed were false. It is indeed an absolute necessity that the theologian should have at his disposal a true philosophy in conformity with the common sense of mankind.”
Therefore, as we move into this third millennium, the Holy Father exhorts philosophy to recover a true metaphysic in order to move beyond the crisis of truth and meaning that threatens the harmony between the twofold order of knowledge of faith and reason, and that threatens even theology itself, which is dependent upon that harmony. “If I insist so strongly on the metaphysical element,” he says, “it is because I am convinced that it is the path to be taken in order to move beyond the crisis pervading large sectors of philosophy ‘at the moment . . .”(83).
Pope John Paul II’s exhortation to recover a true metaphysic is both timely and necessary, given the contemporary situation. “Surveying the situation today,” he says, “we see that the problems of other times have returned . . . . An example of this is the deep-seated distrust of reason which has surfaced in the most recent developments of much of philosophical research, to the point where there is talk at times of ‘the end of metaphysics’”(55).
If there is an end of metaphysics, how can we avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of rationalism and fideism, which the Church has always condemned, and which the Holy Father believes are gaining ground today? He writes that “in some contemporary theologies . . . a certain rationalism is gaining ground, especially when opinions thought to be philosophically well founded are taken as normative for theological research. . . . There are also signs of a resurgence of fideism . . .”(55).
Indeed, the result of abandoning metaphysics is that we all fall into these two “isms,” rationalism and fideism, and then faith and reason would no longer be two integral wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. In short, faith and reason would not be merely distinguished but also — tragically —necessarily separated and therefore compromised. The Pope explains the dire consequence of such separation:
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Deprived of what Revelation offers reason has taken sidetracks which expose it to the danger of losing sight of its final goal. Deprived of reason, faith has stressed feeling and experience, and so run[s] the risk of no longer being a universal proposition. It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition. By the same token, reason which is unrelated to an adult faith is not prompted to turn its gaze to the newness and radicality of being” (48).
Dr. Robert K. Carlson is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Casper College in Casper, Wy. In addition to teaching he is also a frequent lecturer. In his recent book, Truth On Trial: Liberal Education Be Hanged (Crisis Books) he defends the traditional view of liberal education, with its emphasis on objective truth. His articles have appeared in Crisis, The Wanderer, The Shakespearean Rag, and Humanities in the High Country. This is his first article in HPR.
Back to Homiletic & Pastoral Review Table of Contents March 2001