This is a response to Yoda's 4/20 post. It's actually the second half of my comment on it, but it was just getting too long and involved. So here it is.
Shifting gears a bit: "reason is dependent on the soul in the realm of the Spirit." I am taking this to be a variant formulation of the question of faith and reason, in this case, as it pertains to the "realm of spirit." Presumably that realm is composed of those questions (and they're many derivations) which every attuned human soul asks: God, the soul and immortality--the traditional divisions of metaphysical inquiry. Therefore, the most fundamental theological questions are identical to those posed historically by secular metaphysics.
As people of faith we have unique insight into these questions. However, as with the gift of tongues, if we wish to attain to the heights of metaphysics we must start from humility, i.e., faith followed by reason. I'd like to propose working definitions of two distinct modes of knowing: apprehension by faith and apprehension by reason.
"Something grasped by reason is known through the unaided intellectual power of the human mind. Something known by faith is apprehended by a faculty which, by definition, goes beyond what reason can know. Generally speaking, the active and passive roles in these two dialectical paradigms are reversed. The object of faith, divine Revelation, does something to the believing subject. Rational thought, in contrast, is something done by the subject in order to attain a particular object. "
So faith is something done to us and therefore a gift. A gift we can and must prepare ourselves to receive, but whose reception is nonetheless a matter of divine providence.
The result of faith once given is "a certainty of things unseen." Once again intimacy and love are fundamental to this process. My intimacy and love for God not only prepare my soul for the gift of faith, they are what form in my mind the conviction of the contents of divine Revelation. The extent to which I love God is the extent to which I am capable of the certainty of faith. And As B16 says in his encyclical "Spe Salvi," this faith is not "merely transformative but preformative." It requires that we live differently; that we live in hope which stems from the convictions of faith.
Entonces, the emerging model is, as Yoda proposes, reason informed by faith. This does not curtail or inhibit reason but rather unfetters it. Faith reveals certain truths as known by divine Reason and therefore potentially knowable by human reason. It gives the intellect a new horizon to move toward, thereby widening the plain of philosophical metaphysics. These “natural points of contact” (God, immortality and the soul) justify the philosophical process. Christian theology therefore justifies philosophy as a human striving toward a Revealed end. Theology invests philosophy with this absolute potential that allows for the place of wonder within the philosophical quest; that same wonder which Socrates identifies as the starting point of all philosophy. It thus expands the life of the mind, identifying dimensions and possibilities beyond rational cognition.
The ideal is to build our intellectual project on the dual foundations of faith and reason. A truth held by both faith and reason is more likely to withstand the human inconsistencies involved in faith and the, at times, debilitating cynicism of reason. However, in the mean time we are left with the apparent incongruities and paradoxes of what the soul knows and what the mind can know. And here, I think, is where hope comes in. Do we dare allow ourselves to remain in uncertainty, stuck in that two-sizes-too-small eternity between paradoxes, in the hope that there is an answer that perhaps can only be understood by a continual striving and never arriving? That the inquiry itself and not the answer is the answer?
To quote my favorite saret and spiritual director, Fr. Zosima from the Brother's Karamazov: "We cannot know that God exists. But by living a life of active love we can become convinced of it."
Keep on truckin'
..and read Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis.
Grammatical points:
btw Yoda: it's "naught" not "not" in the third line of your post.
whilst I agree for the most part with what is said here, I do find there to be an unnecessary dichotomy between faith and reason. I do not believe the two can be separated (at least not in this life). To say that reason is the unaided intellectual power of the human mind is confusing to me, like talking about grasping something with one's arm unaided by one's nervous system. The two work together, part and parcel.
ReplyDeleteAnd because i do not feel like going into the next room to get a catechism I shall rely on my horrendously fallacious memory: I believe the catechism (and dan keating on the winterconference) described faith as a "kind of sight" a sense we have. It works with our other senses to inform us and help us live. My faith in God is not an assent to the intellectual truth that God exists (i wouldn't lend much credence to this kind of "credo"); it is my personal experience of my relationship with Him; thus I do not doubt his existence as I do not doubt the existence of ppl with whom I converse.
I rambled rather far off the path, but let me just say that to the human being, as far as i can see, faith and reason cannot really be considered separate from one another.
Hmm interesting thought here Joseph. Not sure I agree though. I'll admit it has a certain ontologically simple beauty to it but I don't think that a discussion of faith and reason is analogous to your arm example.
ReplyDeleteThe crux of the analogy, the point that connects them is that one depends on the other (the arm on the nervous system to move/grasp) Reason doesn't depend on Faith for it to work. Especially if we talk about faith as a "personal experience of my relationship with Him"
Now we could talk about not being able to reason with faith in a trivial sense like I can not make reasonable decisions about getting out of a burning building without 'faith' in the fact that it is burning i.e. faith as 'belief'. That I doubt is what you are talking about, nonetheless it did occur to me...
That being said I think that, I tend to, perhaps believe that faith and reason are non-contradictory due to the fact that they deal with different domains, like eyes to sight and eyes to sound. But in that case it does make sense to talk about 'sight' apart from 'smell'. Dunno just some thoughts
I think a distinction might be helpful here. Speaking about the definitions of faith and reason is distinct from speaking about the relationship between faith and reason. To put it bluntly, faith is not identical to reason and therefore has a wholly separate definition and viceversa. So there is a basic and necessary ontological "dichotomy" between faith and reason.
ReplyDeleteNow in terms of their relationship, while I absolutly affirm that they work best when mutually informing one another, they can function without one another. We can look to scorates, plato and aristotle of the exercise of reason unaided (or un informed by faith) and to creationists for the latter scenario. To put it differently I can choose to approach a given subject philosophicaly, religously or (I would argue) theologicaly, which an integrated approach.
Note: perhaps we're equivocating on what we mean by "faith." I think this is what Porch Rat was getting at. At least for my post faith is not synonymous with belief. It is a type of belief that pertains exclusively to the contents of divine Revelation.