Workshop MHP
September 12-18, 2011
Introduction: “Know Yourself.” The meaning of this introduction: The
self as real being, not mere consciousness, is the content of faith and reason.
It is impossible to know the self by reason only, or by faith only. Why?
Because reason and faith are two distinct ways of experiencing being. One
without the other is like one hand clapping.
Source of Confusion:
We confuse the way faith “knows” with the way reason “knows.” We experience
reason to know through concepts or ideas. We see something. We form a mental
likeness of the thing, and we assume that Revelation gives us “supernatural” or
religious likenesses of God in the same way.
Vatican II underwent a radical development in speaking of faith.
John Paul II in dialogue with Andre Frossard: Get
this, and you have got the encyclical.
“Perhaps we
should first cone to an understanding about the very term ‘definition’ [of
faith]… Personally I would not discount the old catechism definition which I
learnt at primary school: faith is ‘to admit as truth what God has revealed and
what the Church gives us to believe.’ However, I will not send you back to the catechism, for this
definition, as it stands, can incur the criticism that it does not attach
sufficient importance to the person, the subject that experiences faith, even
though the very phrase ‘admit as truth’ clearly implies the existence of the
subject. It also indicates the cognitive character of faith in its reference to
the truth that motivates it…. [Going to Vat. II’s Dei Verbum #5] We read
further on in the same text: ‘To God who reveals himself we must bring the obedience of faith by which man entrusts
himself entirely, free, to God, bringing to him
who reveals the complete submissions of his intelligence and heart and
giving with all his will full assent to the Revelation which he has made.’ Thus
faith is man’s reply to the Revelation by which God ‘communicates himself.’ The
constitution Dei Verbum expresses
perfectly the essentially personal character of faith.
“In the
words ‘man entrusts himself to God by the obedience of faith,’ one must see, if
only indirectly, the thought that faith, as response to the revelation by which
God ‘gives himself to man,’ implies through its internal dynamism a reciprocal
gift on the part of man, who in a way ‘also gives himself to God.’ This gift of oneself is the profoundest and
most personal structure of faith….”
“In the act
of faith, man does not respond to God with the gift of a bit of himself, but
with the gift of his whole person. Of course, in this reciprocal relationship
the disproportion remains.[1]
“I have already drawn your attention to the difference
between the catechism formula, `accepting as true all that God reveals,’ and
surrender to God. In the first definition faith is primarily
intellectual, in so far
as it is the welcoming and assimilation of revealed fact. On the other hand,
when the Constitution Dei Verbum tells us that man entrusts
himself to God `by obedience of faith,’ we are confronted with the whole
ontological and existential dimension and, so to speak, the drama of existence
proper to man.
“In
faith man discovers the relativity of his being in comparison with an absolute I
and the contingent character of his own existence. To believe is to
entrust this human I, in all its transcendence and all its transcendent
greatness, but also with its limits, its fragility and its mortal condition, to
Someone who announces himself as the beginning and the end, transcending all that is created and
contingent, but who also reveals himself at the same time as a Person who
invites us to companionship, participation and communion. An absolute person – or better, a personal
Absolute.
“The surrender to God through
faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates to the very depths of
human existence, to the very heart of personal existence. This is how we should understand this `commitment,’
which you mentioned in your question and which presents itself as the solution
to the very problem of existence or to the personal drama of human existence. It
is much more than a purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than
the act of `accepting as true what God has revealed.’”[2]
Joseph Ratzinger’s Habilitation Thesis: “Here,
`revelation’ is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in
which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because
this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of
`revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive `revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has
been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it.
These insights, gained through my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very
important for me at the time of the conciliar discussion on revelation,
Scripture, and tradition. Because, if Bonaventure is right, then revelation
precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply
identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something
greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can
be no such thing as pure sola scriptura (`by Scripture alone’), because an
essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with
this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[3]
Therefore, the subject, the
believer – not concepts or ideas or symbols of any sort – becomes Revelation.
(“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” Mt. 16, 16; “You are Peter and
on this rock I will build my Church” (Mt. 16, 18). The key is to know that
Christ is the “cornerstone,” Peter is rock, and like is known by like. This is
the meaning of Vatican II’s understanding of faith: “obediential act” – total
gift of self that is the reception and becoming of the Person of Christ. Note
that the only person you know experientially is yourself, since only you can
exercise the freedom of mastering yourself to get possession of self and then
to make the gift of self. Therefore, only by becoming “another Christ” by
imaging Him Who is pure relation (gift) to the Father, can you “know” Him. The
notion of relation is putting into a human category what is revealed by
Christ when He says: “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30) and “The Father is
greater than I” (Jn. 14, 28). How can
those two statements both be true at the same time and the same way unless the
Person are relations and not individual substances?
Elsewhere, Ratzinger says the same:
“Revelation always and only becomes a reality where there is faith. The non-believer
remains under the veil of which Paul speaks in the third chapter of his Second
Letter to the Corinthians. He can read Scripture and know what is in it, can
even understand at a purely intellectual level, what is meant and how what is
said hangs together – and yet has not shared in the revelation. Rather,
revelation has only arrived where, in addition to the material assertions
witnessing to it, its inner reality has itself become effective after the
manner of faith. Consequently, the person who receives it also is a part of the
revelation to a certain degree, for without him it does not exist. You cannot
put revelation in your pocket like a book you carry around with you. It is a
living reality that requires a living person as the locus of its presence.”[4]
Therefore,
Revelation is a Person, and faith is becoming that Person. You become that
Person by going out of yourself to receive Him in yourself. Our Lady is the
paradigm of the act of faith. She empties herself to hear the Word. She says
“Yes” to the Angel and to Simeon in the temple that He will be a sign of
contradiction and that a sword will pierce her heart. She takes Christ in by
giving herself in prayer. She then prays the ordinary work of housework and
whatever of Nazareth
You too. So, faith is “life of
faith.” It becomes a contemplative consciousness of attitude rather than concepts and ideas. That is why faith is
“hearing the Word of God and doing it.” The very early Church did not permit
anything to be written down because then they would have the faith stored in
some book. They had to memorize.[5]
Chapter II: Credo
Ut
Thought
experiment: knowledge follows on the experience of being. Kind
of knowledge follows on kind of being. God
is revealed to be Creator, and we and the world are revealed to be created. As
Creator, God’s Being is different from
ours: He will continue in Being when we cease to be. God has revealed Himself
to be a three-fold relation. Therefore our experience of Him will be different
from our experience of the world. The sensible world does not offer something
that is pure relation. It offers relation only as an accident of an individual
substance.
Now, remove the world. Make the
gift of yourself to the revealing Christ so that you become relational as the
divine Persons are relational. That experience is the experience of faith. And
that knowledge is knowledge of the Absolute (as imaged). Reason is quiescent as
contemplative.
Now, return the world. Your
sensible and abstractive knowledge of the contingent world is now embedded in
the knowledge of yourself as absolute imaging the divine Persons. There are now
two experiences going on which gives you a knowledge of yourself as image of
God, the Absolute.You now have recovered reason from the anemia of merely
knowing “things” and having “wilted” into the relativism of an immensity of
facts and data bases without any absolute to give meaning to them. As the
faculty of perception, reason has now been broadened by the faith experience to
perceive being as both created and Creator.
This is the meaning of the “Introduction”
to “Fides
et Ratio:” “Know Yourself.” This explains the opening line of the
encyclical: “In both East and West, we may trace journey which has led humanity
down the centuries to meet and engage truth more and more deeply. It is a
journey which has unfolded – as it must – within the horizon of personal
self-consciousness: the more human beings know reality and the world, the more they
know themselves in their uniqueness, with the question of the meaning of things
and of their very existence becoming ever more pressing.”
Translation: the more you know things through sensation and
abstract thought, the more you realize that none of them and all of them
together do not give you the Absolute that you intellectually crave. This
brings you to the reasonableness of trusting. Trusting is relational and
gives you access to the consciousness of your uniqueness as an image of the revealing
Son. We are sons in the Son. This is the prelude to Chapter III below: I
understand in order to believe..
God has
revealed Himself to be One God in Three Persons: “I and the Father are one”
(Jn. 10, 30); “The Father is greater than I” (Jn. 14, 28). The great mystery is
that the Father, Who is not the Son, nor the Son the Father, are One as
“communio” of Persons. That is, one cannot be without the other, and so, as
constitutively relational, they are One Reality: God. The only way that Father
and the Son can be “one” and yet distinct Persons, is that they be pure
relations to each other. Benedict offers: “The First Person does not beget the Son in
the sense of the act of begetting coming on top of the finished Person; it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of
streaming forth. It is identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it
person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving….”[6] Likewise
the Son and the Spirit are pure relation to each Other and the Father. Benedict
comments: “Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world; the
undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is
discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality… a new plane of being
comes into view.”[7]
Since it is also revealed that we are created in His image and likeness (Genesis 1, 26), then we can know Him only by becoming like Him. We become like Him by becoming relational like Him. This involves becoming relational, which, as we have seen, is the meaning of faith.
Returning to the thought experiment, if knowledge depends on the experience of being, and if the knowing subject is always yearning for the experience of absolute being which drives him on through all the partial knowings of sense experience and abstract thought, then the moment that the searching subject “sees” itself as “like” the Being of the Creator, a rest and peacefulness comes over him in the possession of actually being the absolute as imaging the Son. Reason rests in the illumination of the believing subject that has become relational as the Creator is relational. Thus, faith and reason are the two wings[8] whereby the believer-reasoner experiences the truth of himself as imaging the Creator.
I would insist: the relation of faith and reason is not a sharing of natural and supernatural concepts. It is a consciousness of becoming like God.
The key to the thought experiment consists in dropping sensible reality out of the equation which is the actual history of the relation of faith and reason at the time of the Exile: Greek myth meets Abrahamic faith. The sensible created world basically drops out for the Jews. The God of faith returns in startling clarity.
Historically: It was the notion of Creation that was
forced powerfully on the memory of the Jews because of the Exile. Benedict
writes: “Israel Israel
“At this moment the
prophets opened a new page and taught Israel Egypt Israel
And
so, it was here and now in the 6th century B.C. in the slavery of
Babylon after their fall from a living faith, that the Abrahamic faith as living
experience was recalled and written in a vital confrontation with the
conquering religion of Babylon that explained that “the world assumed its form
when Marduk, the god of light, appeared and split in two the body of the primordial dragon
Chapter III: Intellego Ut
What does this mean? I long for the truth as absolute, but I
am confronted with empirical and partial reality through sensation. I drive
forward always searching for the absolute, the meaning of this and that. I
undertake science, I read everybody, I choose people I trust. In Toronto
Chapter IV: The Relationship Between
Faith and Reason:
What we have seen from
the beginning: The believing person (imaging God) is the absolute that reason
is searching for. That is, the person is “known” by a different kind of
experience than things.
Therefore, St. Anselm: #42: St. Anselm was the first to do the
philosophy of the act of faith, and his importance can scarcely be exaggerated
for the development of the Christian philosophy that followed. The Pope
locates him (#42 and indirectly in #66)
as the significant first in the intellectus fidei as Christian philosophy:
Sokolowski:
However, Robert
Sokolowski recasts the obvious classical interpretation of Anselm’s argument of
proving reality from thought by declaring that the being whom we believe
God to be is greater than any being that can be thought. That is, God is not
only “something greater than can be thought” but God’s greatness and difference
as a being is such that if all the being of creation that can be thought were
not to be, God would not be less. Or, having created all the being that can be
thought, God being is so great and different that it is not more (being). He
says:
“Anselm’s argument works explicitly with the
contrast between being in the mind and being in reality…. But besides this
explicit premise for his argument, there is another, an implicit premise, which
the argument requires but which is not expressed openly by Anselm in chapter
two [of the Proslogion]. This implicit premise also contains a contrast. It
might be formulated as the statement that: (God plus the world) is not greater
than God alone; or: (God plus any creature) is not greater than God alone. This
unstated premise also involves something’s being greater than something else,
but it does not move between mental and extramental existence. The premise
implies that God is to be so understood, and the world or creatures are to be
so understood, that nothing greater, maius, is achieved if the world or
creatures are added to God. To bring out this implication, and to state the
premise in terms more akin to Anselm’s own expression, we must say: (God plus
the world) cannot be conceived as greater than God alone; or: (God plus any
creature) cannot be conceived as greater than God alone.
“Earlier in the Proslogion, in the preface, Anselm had stated this
understanding of God when he said he wished to establish that God is the
highest good `nullo alio indigens; requiring nothing else.’ This is the
understanding of God that is needed for Anselm’s argument; it is implied but
not explicitly stated in the phrase `that than which nothing greater can be
thought,’ for if the world or any creature were to contribute greatness to God,
then God would not be that than which nothing greater can be thought”[10] (underline
mine).
Sokolowski then
points to what Anselm has been the first to do: “Anselm begins something new.
Before him reason was used within
faith, but it was not turned toward faith. In the earlier councils, and in
the work of the church fathers believers made distinctions, drew relationships
and analogies, made identifications, defined things, settled arguments, and
provided explanations; such activities were carried on within faith and they articulated what was believed. But
in Anselm there is an attempt of reason to make belief itself its theme; the attempt is carried out by the
serious entertainment of what the unbeliever might mean when he expresses the
opposite of belief. And Anselm thinks about belief and unbelief, not in regard
to some particular of the Creed, but in regard to the being of God[RAC1] . Reason seems here to establish a distance
toward faith; it seems, in contrast to what it had done in previous centuries,
to come out with a kind of independence, almost a claim to judgment over faith,
even as Anselm continues to say that he does not try to understand in order to
believe but believes in order to understand”[11] (emphasis mine).
B. Union and Distinction between Faith and
Reason: St. Thomas Aquinas
- Daring Use of
Reason to Explain this Novelty of Faith -
#43: St. Thomas
The
separation of faith and reason leaves reason defunct. It cannot find the
absolute it was created for, and languishes. It wilts and languishes under the
burden of a technical world awash in an infinity of facts and data bases. The
miracle of “Google” is drowning the mind triviality. To languish means to
collapse into relativism and nihilism. Nothing is true, since truth always is
an absolute. Without the obediential act of faith, the experience of personal
being that is absolute is not available. We cannot understand now the meaning
of difference of male and female nor defend Christian heterosexual marriage.
Consider Quebec
Chapter V: The Magisterial
Intervention in Philosophical Matters:
Consider again that person is an ontological tendency
toward the Divine that is the Absolute. The appearance of the Word of God as
Person and Absolute speaks to the human person who is in search precisely for
Him, without knowing it explicitly. This Revelation is not a contradiction to
reason but its fulfillment. So also, when the Church speaks the Word to human
reason, it is a true Enlightenment to a search in relative darkness.
Benedict
explains that the Magisterium, as teaching organ of the Body of Christ Who is revelation, speaks to the person as
ontological tendency searching out the absolute. The Magisterium is not then a problem for reason, but its fulfillment.
It has a maieutic function.
“The
anamnesis instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without
so that it can become aware of itself. But this “from without” is not something
set in opposition to anamnesis but is ordered to it. It has maieutic function,
imposes nothing foreign but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis,
namely, its interior openness to the truth.”[12]
[1] JPII and
Andre Frossard, Be Not Afraid St. Martin ’s Press (1984) 64
[2] Ibid.
66-67.
[3] J.
Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977 Ignatius 107-109.
[4] J.
Ratzinger, “God’s Word, - Scripture, Tradition, Office,” Ignatius (2008)52.
[5] John
Henry Newman, “The Arians of the Fourth Century,” UNDP (2001) 47-50.UNDP
[6] J.
Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 131-132.
[7] Ibid.
132.
[8] “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 (cf. Ex. 33, 18; Ps. 27, 8-9; 63, 2-3; Jn. 14, 8; 1 Jn. 3, 2).
[9] J.
Ratzinger, “‘In the Beginning…’” Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1995) 10-12.
[10] R.
Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason, UNDP, (1982) 8.
[11] Ibid.,
6.
[12] J.
Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Ignatius (2006) 34.
[RAC1]This
is rather huge. Sokolowski is talking about the Being of God as accessed by
another kind of experience than sensation and abstract concepts and reasoning.
He is accessed as self-transcending Person,and therefore, if everything else
were to cease to exist, then He would continue to exist because He is Creator.
We tend to access God as “Part” of our world experience through sensation and
concepts. And so faith and reason are not in conflict because they don’t
inhabit the same noetic world of experience, and the way of knowing is
distinct.
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