Jacques Maritain Center :
Characters in Search of Their Author /
by Ralph McInernyOne may define the human being, therefore, as the one who seeks the truth.
-- Fides et ratio, n. 28
While natural theology, as its content, has its native habitat in pagan or pre-Christian philosophy, the appellation 'natural theology' has its provenance in Christianity and calls attention to the difference between the approach to God by way of natural reason, on the one hand, and by way of Revelation, on the other. In this final lecture, I would like to reflect further on this opposition.
From the beginning of the Christian era, thinkers have pondered the relationship between philosophical inquiry into God, his attributes, the relations between the world and God, the problem of evil, and so forth, on the one hand, and the truths about these matters which have been revealed and which are accepted as true thanks to the gift of divine faith, on the other. The Fathers of the Church, notably St. Augustine, spoke to this contrast and in what might be called the Monastic Period a 'modus vivendi' was reached between faith and reason, stated in terms of the contrast between secular learning, presumed to be adequately summed up in the seven liberal arts, and sacred learning, based on Scripture. While the history of what might be called the Liberal Arts Tradition is fascinating n itself, and not as homogeneous as my remarks perhaps suggest, it did survive well into the twelfth century, when it was disturbed by the arrival in Latin translation of works of Aristotle which had hitherto been unknown. In the thirteenth century, with the foundation of universities and the possession of the Aristotelian corpus in its entirety, along with Arabic commentaries on the Aristotelian treatises, as well as many other treasures of human learning, it became clear that secular learning or philosophy and the seven liberal arts could no longer be thought of as coterminous. The university thus became the place where a new modus vivendi had to be worked out and, by common consent, the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on the matter was the most satisfying.
It was not the case, of course, that Thomas's view was accepted by all this contemporaries; indeed, during his lifetime, and afterward, his views were persistently criticized and, historically speaking, did not dominate rival positions on the relationship between faith and reason. Nonetheless, his view was to become the official view of the Church, consolidated by the Thomistic Revival inaugurated by Leo XIII in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris. Friend and foe alike have come to take Thomas's views on this matter as either correct or the position against which to test one's steel.
Pope John Paul II in his 1998 encyclical Faith and Reason reviewed the history just sketched and had important things to say about the viability of the Thomistic solution today in the light of developments in philosophy. This lecture will take its departure from the thought of Thomas -- as indeed many of my previous ones have -- as well as from John Paul II's Faith and Reason.
Of the two diametrically opposed positions that believers may take on this matter -- one holding that faith provides the only access to God and that consequently philosophical or natural theology is either a mistake or surpassed, and another that sees a complementarity of faith and reason in their approaches to God -- it is the second that I shall be adopting. Earlier in speaking of Christian philosophy, I said some few things about those believers, usually, but not always Protestants, who dismiss as presumptuous philosophical attempts to arrive at certain knowledge of God.
I shall be addressing two major questions. First, since faith is contrasted with reason in this discussion, the question arises as to the reasonableness of holding as true statements about God that one cannot demonstrate and know in that sense. Is faith a vacation from reason? Second, in the light of the impressionistic survey of the trajectory of modern philosophy given in my first set of lectures, the upshot of which was that the capacity of reason itself to attain certain truth in any area, let alone when the existence and nature of God are at issue, is called into question, it became necessary to establish the range of reason by undercutting the fundamental assumption that leads to an all too familiar contemporary skepticism. A paradoxical result of these discussions will be the realization that it has now fallen to believers to come to the defense of reason in order to defend the faith. This task is particularly urgent because of the way in which faith presupposes reason and would be unintelligible without a robust confidence in the capacity of our mind to know the world and enunciate truths about it.
Faith, in the sense of taking a claim to be true on the word of another, is not confined to religious matters. Our need to trust one another lies at the basis of any community. Moreover, it is often pointed out that, in the sciences, one takes as true the reports that others give of their research, without reenacting it and thereby coming to know that the results are true. The veracity and credibility of those engaged in any of the sciences is a necessary presupposition of advance in scientific knowledge. It was once said, with an eye to religious belief, that it is immoral to take as true anything that we do not know to be true. Of such a demand we would not simply say that it is austere, but that it is a practical impossibility. If every scientist had to know in the strong sense of scientific knowing everything he accepts as true within even his own narrow discipline, he would spend his life verifying the work of others and never complete the task. Nonetheless, such trust or faith among scientists is of a special kind. While it is practically impossible for the individual scientist personally to verify all that he accepts as true, it would strike us as strange to say that the whole scientific enterprise reposes on faith and thus is analogous to religious faith. The implicit reductio in the analogy would be that one has no more basis for objecting to religious faith than he does to the practice of the scientist. However, while it is true that it is practically impossible for a scientist to verify personally everything that he holds as scientifically true, it is possible for him to verify personally anything he holds as scientifically true. Indeed that is the implicit assumption of his trust. He believes a scientific claim to be true in the sense that he believes that he or any other competent scientist could show it is true. In this his faith is very different from religious faith. The Trinity is not an hypothesis that I or anyone else could show to be true.
But if the faith of scientists is thus markedly different from religious faith, the interpersonal trust of human beings is not always or obviously a matter of verifiable truths. Indeed, the activity of scientists might seem to be a peculiarly regional instance of our trust in one another and scarcely paradigmatic of it. Most of the things we trust one another about are not expressible as claims whose truth is attainable independently of the relationship between one person and another. A promise is a commitment to make something true. When a man and woman marry they "plight one another their troth." They are not predicting that something or other will be the case in five, ten, or fifty years; rather, they pledge to make it the case, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad. How could they know it with anything resembling scientific knowledge, of course, and yet they do know it. This kind of interpersonal trust is a far better analogue to religious belief.
Thomas Aquinas discusses the act of religious faith in terms of Augustine's definition of it as "cum assensione cogitare: thinking with assent." Thinking may be either simple or complex, thinking of a thing, which could be expressed in a definition, or thinking something about it, which would be expressed in a proposition. Only propositions are true or false and of any proposition it can be said that either it or its contradictory is true. Complex thinking thus takes place under the sign pV~p. But which? When we are in a state of doubt, we vacillate between contradictories and assent to neither. When we have an opinion, we choose one of contradictories but do not assent to it in such a way that we wholly exclude the possibility that its opposite is true: the evidence is not conclusive. When we wholly exclude the other contradictory, we are said to assent. But this can come about either thanks to intellect or to will. Thanks to intellect, when the terms of the proposition are such that we immediately assent to it, as to something self-evident. But when a proposition is not self-evident, we may nonetheless give it our full assent because it follows demonstratively from true and necessary premises. Thanks to will, when the mind settles on one of contradictories, not because it is compelled to do so because of self-evidence or because it has been demonstrated, but because the will prompts assent to the good involved in so assenting.{1} In this way, we can trust another person in the interpersonal way described above. And in this way too we believe in the religious sense.
Whatever thinking is done about what is proposed for our belief, it cannot bring the mind to assent because what is proposed is self-evident or follows necessarily from other things we know to be true. The thinking (cogitatio) does not cause assent (assensus), as it does in the case of demonstration. What enables the mind to give its assent to revealed truth is the fact that the will under the influence of grace is moved by the promise of an eternal happiness, which is the reward for the assent. Because the mind is moved by will and not by the evidence of the object, the assent does not stop the mind from continued pondering (cogitatio)
| Latin | English |
|---|---|
| Sed in fide est assensus et cogitatio quasi ex aequo: non enim assensus ex cogitatione causatur sed ex voluntate, ut dictum est; sed quia intellectus non hoc modo terminator ad unum ut ad proprium terminum perducatur, qui est visio alicuius intelligibilis, inde est quod eius motus nondum est quietatus, sed adhuc habet cogitationem et inquisitionem de his qui credit quamvis eis firmissime assentiat: quantum enim est ex se ipso non est ei satisfactum nec est terminates ad unum sed terminator tantum ex extrinsico. (Q.D. de veritate, q. 14, a.1, c.) | In faith assent and cogitation are present equally, for the assent is not caused by cogitation but by will, as has been said; and since intellect is not thus terminated to one =of contradictories= as when it is brought to its proper term, which is the seeing of something intelligible, so its activity is not yet at rest, but cogitation and inquiry continue concerning what one believes, even though he most firmly assents to it: taken as such, =intellect= is not satisfied nor is it terminated in one, except by an extrinsic cause. |
It will be seen how close this account of faith is to Kierkegaard's discussion of subjective truth: "An object uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness." And one can see too why Cardinal Newman insisted that the considerations that led to his acceptance of the Catholic faith were probabilities, not conclusive reasoning. But for all their probable character, the upshot was a firm and certain assent.
Knowing and believing being distinguished in this way, one can go on to speak of philosophy and theology. As we have argued earlier, the philosopher takes his beginnings from truths which are the common possession of mankind. He reflects on these and labels them as we suggested, and then goes on in pursuit of further knowledge, which may take him very far indeed from the concerns of ordinary human beings. For all that, he shares with them from first to last the common truths which serve as his principles. The truths of faith are the possession of all believers, but the theologian reflects on them, using the more or less sophisticated techniques he has learned in his previous studies. It was the hallmark of Scholastic theology that it brought to the pondering of the truths of faith techniques learned while studying philosophy, most particularly that of Aristotle.{2} The theologian will accordingly ask what the subject of his discipline is, what the principles of his science are, what proofs are appropriate to it, and he will go on -- if he is Thomas Aquinas -- to construct a vast and complicated intellectual edifice setting out the faith by ordering its contents, developing the implications of believed truths, and ways of handling those who attack the faith. Fides quaerens intellectum. The truths of faith are to theology as the common principles are to philosophy. However similar to philosophical discourse theological discourse might look, the essential and abiding difference lies in their starting points. Just as the philosopher assumes, along with everybody else, the truth of the common principles and goes on from there, so the theologian assumes the truths of the faith, along with all other believers, and goes on from there. The structure of theological discourse can look very much like that of philosophy, but the whole edifice depends on truths accepted on the basis of faith. That is, truths not known to be true, but believed.
Given the character of theology and the background of the theologian, the question of how the act of reason that is believing compares to the act of reason that is knowing is bound to be raised. Is it reasonable to give assent to truths one cannot understand? The reasonableness of faith cannot be shown by proving that the propositions which express its object are true. It is however possible to argue, as we showed at the end of Lecture Five, that the assent of faith is reasonable. That argument is based on a difference that is noted among the truths that have been revealed and which are thus accepted on faith. Among them are to be found truths about God -- that he is one, that he is the cause of all else, etc. -- which have been established by pagan philosophers, that is, independently of revelation and faith. Most of what has been revealed is unknowable in this life, however. The first subset of revealed truths was dubbed praeambula fidei, and the second larger subset mysteria fidei. Because of this, faith sometimes bears on a truth that is knowable, and some believers, thanks to argument, may come to see the truth of the preambles. The reasonableness of believing consists in this: that, if some of what has been revealed can be known to be intelligible and true, it is reasonable to accept the rest as intelligible and true.
The reasonableness of faith is also seen in the way the believer refutes objections to the faith. Such a refutation takes many forms. A charge that the believer is assenting to something that is obviously unintelligible will be met by an argument showing it is not obviously unintelligible. Thus, refutation takes the form of showing that the arguments against the faith are not conclusive, however probable they may be. And the believer concedes that sometimes they seem very probable. Refutations or responses of this kind must take care not to seem to show that the contradictory of a mystery of the faith is necessarily false. If one knows that one of contradictories is false, one knows that the other -- in this case the mystery -- is true. Sometimes the believer must content himself with showing that if the naysayer were right, he would have to be equally critical of something he presumably would not wish to be. This kind of argument has been developed into a fine art by my colleague Al Plantinga.
One who has been brought up in the faith accepts as true a vast number of truths about God, many of them implicitly -- he accepts whatever God has revealed -- but in his frequent recitation of the Creed he will articulate the most important of them. Among the articles, or presupposed by them, are truths about God that philosophers, pagan and otherwise, have established on the basis of proof. When the theologian calls these "preambles of faith," he is calling attention to their presence within Revelation. He might even say that the mysteries of faith entail the preambles of faith.{3} This inclusion of truths which can be established by reason within the deposit of faith, and the fact that faith provides the principles of theology, can suggest that philosophy is thereby assumed into theology and the distinction between the two disciplines overcome.
But the praeambula fidei are not as such the whole of philosophy, unless one maintains that in order to establish their truth the whole of philosophy is required, since truths about God fall to metaphysics which is the culmination of the philosophical task, the wisdom out of desire for which one began. Gilson gave as the subject matter of Christian philosophy the praeambula fidei. Theology, though not faith, presupposes philosophy, and thus the establishment of naturally knowable truths about God would come prior to taking up the task of theology.
If, seen as part of the deposit of faith, the acquisitions of natural theology are seen as perambulatory as to what is of faith in the strong sense,{4} it should not be thought that they in any way entail the mysteries or compel one to believe. The preambles may be entailed by, be implicit in, the mysteria the believer believes. But what is of faith is neither entailed by nor implicit in what can be known about God by natural reason. This asymmetry between faith and reason allays the fears of those believers who consider natural theology to be but a first step on a path that leads as well to making the mysteries claims whose truth can be decided by the usual philosophical methods.
In his encyclical Faith and Reason, John Paul II distinguishes two different stances of philosophy vis-à-vis Christian faith: first, a philosophy completely independent of the Gospel's Revelation. This was the case perforce of the pagan philosophers in the pre-Christian era. "We see here philosophy's valid aspirations to be an autonomous enterprise, obeying its own rules and employing the powers of reason alone" (n. 75). Although it is a search for truth within the natural order -- it knew no other -- as a search for truth, pagan philosophy "is always open -- at least implicitly -- to the supernatural" (ibid.). In the Christian era, the autonomy of philosophy must be respected "even when theological discourse makes use of philosophical concepts and arguments." This autonomy is explained by the fact that arguments according to rigorous rational criteria are meant to arrive at results that are "universally valid." Presumably this distinguishes philosophical arguments from theological since the latter are seen to be truth-bearing only by those who have faith, that is, hold as true the principles of theology. He goes on to distinguish autonomy from separation. "This theory claims for philosophy not only a valid autonomy, but a self-sufficiency of thought which is patently invalid. In refusing the truth offered by divine Revelation, philosophy only does itself damage, since this is to preclude access to a deeper knowledge of truth" (ibid.). It is safe to say that such a statement would raise the hackles of the majority of professional philosophers. But the contrast is prelude to the notion of Christian philosophy. Thus, what the pope called a first stance of philosophy toward Christian faith turns out to be two, either one in which the philosopher is wholly unaware of Christianity and goes about his work, or one in which the philosopher, being aware of Christianity, dismisses it on the basis that reason is sufficient unto itself, and thus excludes Christianity. The discussion of Christian philosophy, on this reading, turns out to be a third possible stance.
The pope distinguishes two aspects of Christian philosophy, a subjective and an objective. One subjective effect of the faith on the philosopher is to bring home to him that, however great the reach of reason, there is a vast reality beyond the grasp of our understanding. He will also supplement what he can know with what he believes in discussing such vexed questions as the problem of evil and suffering, the personal nature of God, the meaning of life, and why is there anything at all rather than nothing. There is here a mixture of the influence of virtues on the believer and the claim that the data of Revelation are helpful in handling some difficult philosophic questions. When he turns to the objective side of Christian philosophy, there is therefore an overlap. Under the influence of their faith, philosophers have clarified God's causality and his personal nature. The notion of sin has influenced their philosophical discussions of evil. And the notion of person is perhaps one of the most obvious philosophical benefits under the influence of faith. But the further menu of topics that fall to Christian philosophy -- the rationality of certain truths expressed in Scripture, the possibility of man's supernatural vocation -- does not pertain to philosophy. "In speculating on these questions, philosophers have not become theologians, since they have not sought to understand and expound the truths of faith on the basis of Revelation" (n. 76). But will they presume to understand and expound the faith on the basis of rational principles? The discussion of Christian philosophy seems to merge into the following discussion of philosophy as the ancilla theologiae, the theologian's use of philosophy.
For some believers their one intellect is the subject not only of the virtue of faith but also of such intellectual virtues as science, metaphysics, and the like. That there should be commerce between what he believes and what he knows is unsurprising; he is, after all but one person. Personally, subjectively, his intellectual life must seem a continuum, with matters of faith as familiar to him as Goedel's Theorem. On reflection, he realizes the different provenance of truths of faith and philosophical truths, and this will perhaps prompt an explicit consideration of their difference. Any such comparison must be thought of as theological, since it is discourse within the ambit of revealed truths which are the guide, and are not the upshot, of the discussion. The believing philosopher will doubtless be guided in his discussion of evil by what he holds on the basis of his faith, but the latter will not be thematic in the philosophical discussion as such. If he mentions the role Christ's Passion plays in his understanding of the seriousness of evil, his non-believing colleague will understand that nothing strictly of faith can be crucial in the argument as philosophical. The believer does not wish to redefine the nature of philosophy; on the contrary, he insists on its difference from theology. But in his practice he will be a constant rebuke and irritant to those who wish to ply the philosophical trade in total separation from, indeed in more or less explicit opposition, to Christianity. Philosopher after philosopher in recent times has defined knowledge or truth or meaning in such a way as explicitly to exclude Christian faith as reasonable. It is modern philosophy, in other words, that has thus injected theology into philosophical discussions. Perhaps only when it is considered as lapsed Christian philosophy will we understand the animus of modern thought against Christian faith. In any case, on both sides, the discussions will not remain within the limits of philosophy as traditionally understood. Unmasked as theologians manqués, the great figures of modern and contemporary philosophy will be seen as themselves warranting the placement of philosophical discussions in the wider context of Christianity. What has been called the Atheology of modern philosophy is, after all, often a theological excursion.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Faith and Reason is its defense of reason. Mirabile dictum, the encyclical's survey of the trajectory of modern philosophy reaches a conclusion not unlike that reached in my October lectures. The search for truth has given way to pragmatic compromises based on the epistemological assumption that the mind is incapable of grasping a reality which would render its judgments true. But a mind incapable of the truth is not an apt subject for Christian faith. That is why the encyclical makes its plea for philosophers to get back to work with a renewed confidence that the work can be done. It asks philosophy to "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" (n. 82). That this is a presupposition of faith is a powerful stimulus to the believing philosopher to devote himself to the defense of reason.
In these lectures I have tried, in a modest way, to clear away some obstacles to carrying on the noble work of philosophy. These are times in which doubt is cast on our ability to know anything at all, let alone that God exists. This creates special difficulties for one whose task it was to discuss natural theology. Much of what I have had to say, accordingly, is preliminary, for it seemed to me that, without some effort, however inadequate, to remove the obstacles that have been placed in the path of our pursuit of truth, it would have been impossible to even gesture in the direction of the recovery of natural theology. So mine has been, perforce, a modest task, modestly performed, but for all that of fundamental importance.
FEBRUARY 22, 2000
{1} ". . . determinatur autem per voluntatem quae elegit assentire uni parti determinate et praecise propter aliquid quod es sufficiens ad movendum voluntatem non autem ad movendum intellectum, utpote quia videtur bonum vel conveniens huic parti assentire; et ista est disposition credentis ut cum aliquis credit dictis alicuius hominis quia videtur decens vel utile. Et sic etiam movemur ad credendum dictis Dei in quantum nobis repromittitur, si crediderimus, praemium aeternae vitae; et hoc praemio movetur voluntas ad assentiendumhis quae dicuntur quamvis intellectus non moveatur per aliquid intellectum; et ideo dicit Augustinus quod ‘cetera potest homo nolens, credere non nisi volens’" (Q. D. de veritate, q. 14, a.1,c.).
{2} See John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
{3} It would be misleading in the extreme to understand "preambles" to mean that the believer advances from them to the mysteries of the faith. He accepts all of them at once and under the same formality, because they have been revealed by God. Etienne Gilson was particularly vexed by the suggestion that natural theology was a necessary prelude to the faith, as if the believer, qua believer, had first to prove the existence of God and then go on to the Incarnation and Trinity. See Le philosophe et la théologie (Paris: Fayard, 1960).
{4} Only the mysteria are strictly speaking objects of faith, since the only way they can be held as true is on divine authority; the preambula, while no doubt believed by most, can in principle by known and thus for them to be believed is per accidens to them.