'Faith and reason': in latest encyclical, pope defends key role of Western values

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 23, 1998 by John Thavis

In a long-awaited encyclical titled Fides et Ratio ("Faith and Reason"), Pope John Paul II warned of a growing separation between modern thought and the "ultimate truths" of religion, a division he said is leading people to ethical confusion and even despair.

As antidote, the pope appealed for a renewed harmony between philosophy and theology. He urged intellectual leaders to rise above today's utilitarian vision of life and allow transcendent truths to guide them.

At a news conference Oct. 25, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said the 35,000-word text may represent the summa or maximum expression of John Paul's pontificate so far. Ratzinger, the Vatican's chief doctrinal official, said the 78-year-old pontiff had worked on the text for 12 years, though it is written on a theme that he began investigating as a professor of ethics in the 1950s.

Addressed to the bishops of the world and written in a specialized vocabulary, its message was aimed primarily at experts in the fields of philosophy and theology.

The language is dense and difficult. But the encyclical, John Paul's 13th, struck universal familiar themes about the meaning of life, the ability to know the truth and the questions posed by evil and death.

In his 1995 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor ("The Splendor of Truth"), the pope examined a number of specific moral teachings that he said had been forgotten. His new document looks at the search for truth itself, the essential quest to "know thyself" that has motivated philosophers and theologians for centuries. Once again, he finds cause for alarm on the modern landscape, with its dominant features of skepticism, unbelief and ethical uncertainty.

In a global culture that mistrusts absolute truths and relies too much on pragmatism and technology, it said, many men and women are left to "stumble through life" confused and anxious.

"At the end of this century, one of our greatest threats is the temptation to despair," the pope wrote. The aim of the encyclical, he said, was to offer people fresh confidence in seeking the truth and alert them to errors that condition their attitudes and behavior.

The pope asks the church's theologians to recover the "metaphysical dimension of truth" in their own work, and to help bring the certainties of faith back into the moral life of believers.

Two wings for the spirit

The pope's appeals to philosophers and theologians are strongly argued and full of passion, reflecting his own background as a professor of ethics in the philosophy faculty of the University of Lublin in Poland. His closest aides say these themes -- man's relationship with God, his search for meaning and the modern conditions that hinder this search -- are still the topics that get the 78-year-old pontiff fired up in private conversations.

The new encyclical challenges in particular a "postmodern" view that would judge all values as relative. In a global culture that largely accepts a retreat from absolutes, people feel cut off from values, drifting through life "to the very edge of the abyss without knowing where they are going," he wrote. Truth cannot be arrived at by consensus, and morality cannot be decided by majority vote, he said, yet such ideas are taking hold -- a consequence of the notion that reason can arrive at truth apart from faith.

The encyclical emphasized Christ's salvation as the event that enlightens both theology and philosophy. It said Christian revelation is a "lodestar for all" who seek to know life's meaning, and defended the "universal value" of the church's philosophical heritage.

Divided into seven chapters and heavily footnoted, the encyclical begins with a simple thematic statement: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." The church's interest in ultimate truths builds upon an age-old quest for meaning that can be seen in such diverse sources as Homeric poetry, the preachings of Buddha and the Old Testament, the encyclical said.

This search for final answers has always been a hallmark of philosophy, which over the centuries has left a "spiritual heritage" to humanity: a core of insight into the human being's capacity to know God, truth and goodness, as well as certain fundamental moral norms shared by all, it said.

But the pope said the modern age, increasingly skeptical of any claim of absolute truth and increasingly absorbed by human experience and data, has driven a wedge between faith and reason. One result is a dangerous misunderstanding of freedom, he said.

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He outlined a catalog of current philosophical errors and said theologians have been susceptible to them, too. These included historicism, which gauges the validity of a philosophy according to its historical context; scientism, which relegates religious and theological knowledge to the realm of fantasy; pragmatism, which excludes judgments made on ethical principles; and nihilism, which denies all the foundations of objective truth.

These errors, the pope said, have profoundly influenced modern attitudes, especially in science and technology. Some experts in these fields feel they have a "quasi-divine power" over nature and human beings, he said. The pope said technological progress demands, instead, a sharpened sense of ultimate values.