Benedict XVI , the Pathologies of Faith and Reason and Christian Liberal Arts Education

Samuel Gregg is an intelligent and articulate interpreter of Catholic theology, especially moral theology and economics. He has a very good article entitled "Benedict XVI: In No One's Shadow" in the American Spectator.

He discusses Benedict's reform of the banalities of the post-Vatican II liturgy and the fast-improving relations with the Eastern Orthodox Churches before turning to Benedict's analysis of what is wrong with the Western world. He articulates concisely and precisely some ideas I have clumsily tried to express about Benedict's importance as a prophet to late modernity. He writes:

"But above all, Benedict has -- from his pontificate's very beginning -- gone to the heart of the rot within the West, a disease which may be described as pathologies of faith and reason.

In this regard, Benedict's famous 2006 Regensburg address may go down as one of the 21st century's most important speeches, comparable to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard Address in terms of its accuracy in identifying some of the West's inner demons.

Most people think about the Regensburg lecture in terms of some Muslims' reaction to Benedict's citation of a 14th century Byzantine emperor. That, however, is to miss Regensburg's essence. It was really about the West.

Christianity, Benedict argued at Regensburg, integrated Biblical faith, Greek philosophy, and Roman law, thereby creating the "foundation of what can rightly be called Europe." This suggests that any weakening of this integration of faith and reason would mean the West would start losing its distinctive identity. In short, a West without a Christianity that integrates faith and reason is no longer the West.

Today, Benedict added, we see what happens when faith and reason are torn asunder. Reason is reduced to scientism and ideologies of progress, thereby rending reasoned discussion of anything beyond the empirical impossible. Faith dissolves into sentimental humanitarianism, an equally inadequate basis for rational reflection. Neither of these emaciated facsimiles of their originals can provide any coherent response to the great questions pondered by every human being: "Who am I?" "Where did I come from?" "Where am I going?"

So what's the way back? To Benedict's mind, it involves affirming that what he recently called creative reason lies at the origin of everything.

As Benedict explained one week before he beatified his predecessor: "We are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges upon in the final analysis."

Read it all here. I totally agree with Gregg's analysis of the Regensburg Address and I have made the exact same argument about it in a recently published chapter in a book.

I especially like his use of the phrase "integration of faith and reason" to describe the cultural origins of Europe in Greek philosophy, Biblical faith and Roman law. This phrase "the integration of faith and reason" is often used in a banal and empty manner in Christian liberal arts colleges. One can never be quite sure what is meant by it and it can easily degenerate into little more than a marketing slogan. But Benedict gives it some specific form and content.

What if this definition of integrating faith and reason were to be taken seriously in Christian liberal arts education? What if the liberal arts curriculum were to be organized around this motif as the center? What if the goal of a liberal arts curriculum were to become conversant with Greek philosophy, Biblical faith and Roman law and how they shaped Christendom and then how modernity has declined and both philosophy and law decayed because of modernity's rejection of the Biblical basis of the Christian West?

This would make Christian university education decisively different from the secular version on offer in the decadent, late modern universities. It would revolutionize the teaching of literature, the natural sciences, the social sciences and history, as well as philosophy and theology. It would produce citizens of a Christian culture who were equipped to see through the modern pathologies of faith and reason and ready to be real salt and light in a dying culture. Could Evangelicals liberal arts colleges, with an assist from this scholar-pope, dream of being that radical and that counter-cultural? Do we have the faith to follow Christ when all around us God is being dismissed as out-dated and unnecessary? Can we as faculty and our students make a reasoned and articulate case for creative reason (the Logos of John 1) as the origin and meaning of everything?

Well, why not?

Why Evolution Cannot Explain a Man Capable of Grasping the Theory of Evolution

Denish D'Souza's book, What's So Great About Christianity (Tyndale, 2007), is an excellent refutation of the "New Atheism." Here, in this passage, D'Souza popularizes skillfully a point made by many others including Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address.

First D'Souza quotes Stephen Hawking, who articulates the atheist dilemma.

Now if you beleive that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories in science into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. But there is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. Our ideas about scientific theories . . . assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress every closer to the the laws that govern our universe. Yet is there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions. And so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion?" (as quoted by D'Souza, pp. 249-50)

Hawking really cannot give any explanation for why a universe based on chance and natural selection should throw up creatures who are rational and able to see order and structure in nature. Where did the order and structure come from? Why should we be able to grasp it? How does natural selection produce the order and the rational knower?

D'Souza suggests that there is no explanation for Hawkings' dilemma unless you posit the existence of God.

Based on evolution, our ideas may be considered useful to us, but there are no grounds for presuming that they correspond with truth. Indeed a useful lie is preferable to a truth that plays no role in genetic self-perpetuation. In reducing everything to the laws of nature we risk denying that there is any rationality or truth behind nature's laws. (pp. 251-2)

We see contemporary late-modernity (aka "postmodernity") making this exact move; our culture is losing it faith in the existence of truth. And it is a matter of faith. Early modern scientists did not know that there were laws governing the world: they believed there were because they believed in a God who created the world by his Wisdom and Word - in other words by reason.

Augustinian Christianity says that Hawkings' unified theory of everything exists in the mind of God and that we have been created in his image with free will to make moral choices and reason to discern the hand of God in nature.

Christianity allows us to escape both: (1) the deterministic fatalism of Hawkings' unified theory (which is the reduction of human nature to the laws of physics) and (2) the loss of faith in reason that leads to relativism, nihilism and the will to power in post-Nietzschean philosophy.

Pope Benedict makes a similar point about science itself pointing beyond itself to God in his Regensburg Address:

. . . modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element [i.e. the mathematical structure of reality discussed earlier in the lecture] bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structure of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.

Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, an one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, abeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religions traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. . .

The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. (#59-62)

We must believe in God if we want to preserve human dignity, free will and science. This is our urgent message to our culture today.

Smart People Tend to Be Liberals and Socialists

It is true; I freely admit it. Go to any university and poll the faculty; it will be overwhelmingly liberal, (which is why William F. Buckley Jr. famously remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Boston phone directory than by the faculty of Harvard). Examine the intellectual class in general and you will find that most people are liberals who tend toward socialism or outright socialists. No wonder J. S. Mill called conservatives "the stupid party."

F. A. Hayek, in that fascinating book of his old age entitled, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, also admits this fact even in the process of dismantling socialism as mistaken in fact, illogical and manifestly wrong. He writes:

"One's initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminishes when one realizes that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilization offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired features by still more intelligent reflection, and still more appropriate design and 'rational coordination' of our undertakings. This leads one to be favourably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism. Of course intellectuals will demand explanations for everything they are expected to do, and will be reluctant to accept practices just because they happen to govern the communities into which they have been born; and this will lead them into conflict with, or at least to a low opinion of, those who quietly accept prevailing rules of conduct. Moreover, they also understandably will want to align themselves with science and reason, and with the extraordinary progress made by the physical sciences during the past several centuries, and since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that there can exist any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validity of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason. Thus a distinguished historian has written in this vein: 'Tradition is almost by definition reprehensible, something to be mocked and deplored.'"

Hayek here is making two closely related points. The first is a point about the temptation smart people face to over-estimate the uses of reason. Elsewhere, Hayek quotes Hume to the effect that our reason does not and cannot control our instincts and appetites. So the first point has to do with a Pelagian view of the self as unfallen and perfectly able to control one's own actions and desires by reason. The second point is one about the sociology of knowledge and how constructivism and scientism, which have no logical connection to real empirical science, are nevertheless absorbed by people by osmosis from those who deceptively use science to peddle their pet philosophies. One thinks of Col. 2:8 here.

Hayek then goes on to point out the dangers in this way of thinking.

"These reactions are all understandable, but they have consequences. The consquences are particularly dangerous - to reason as well as to morality - when preference not so much for the real products of reason as for this conventional tradition of reason leads intellectuals to ignore the theoretical limits of reason, to disregard a world of historical and scientific information, to remain ignorant of the biological sciences and the sciences of man such as economics, and to misrepresent the origin and functions of our moral rules.

Like other traditions, the tradition of reason is learnt, not innate. It too lies between instinct and reason; and the question of the real reasonableness and truth of this tradition of proclaimed reason and truth must now also scrupulously be examined." (pp. 53-4, italics original)

The moral of this story is that intelligence does not equal wisdom. To be smart is good, so long as one does not make an idol out of autonomous rationality and bow down before it. Conservatism is (in Russell Kirk's words) "reason operating within tradition" and socialism is reason operating autonomously while holding tradition in contempt. Revelation, of course, is passed on to us by tradition (including the Scriptures and commentary on them).

Knowing God by Means of Reason

Sometimes those of us who are Protestant, especially those in the Reformed tradition, tend to caricacture the Roman Catholic tradition as semi-Pelagian on the issue of the ability of reason to know God. At the same time, many Protestants appear to succomb to a fiedism that borders on irrationality and arises from rather suspect sources in nominalism. Is there a Protestant, Reformed view of reason that is also genuinely Catholic? John Webster is one theologian who is providing a convincing "Yes" in answer to that question.

In the editorial to the most recent issue of the International Journal of Systematic Theology, he describes what he called in his book Holiness, "holy reason." This quote is well worth meditating on and pondering:

"Reason is a grace; by the redeeming work of the divine Word, made real in the Spirit's power, reason is made new, brought back from ruin and alienation and restored to its vocation of knowing God in his self-communication. Reason's 'seeing' - the sphere of its operations - is the divine economy, and in this economy, reason is formed and brought to life and activity, so that it becomes an instrument of fellowship with God. Through reason creatures apprehend God and are enabled to fulfill their calling to intelligent adoration of the creator and all his works. Yet in the wake of the Fall, the condition for this is the humbling of reason: the setting aside of reason's pretence to be the author of knowledge or the adjudicator of what may or may not be said. Reason must be redeemed and sanctified, and only then may it judge and direct. But it is indeed redeemed and sanctified: mistrust of reason (as, for example, merely an exercise of power) is as ruinous as trust in its omnicompetence. And Christian theology is an instance of this redeemed intellectual judgement."

A Reasonable Definition of Reason

From Nouvelle Theologie, comes an excellent article on the role of reason in Biblical study.

"In a previous post, I noted that Catholic art and music, liturgy, prayer, theology, ethics, and canon law have a tremendous Scriptural depth to them — everything in Catholic culture has been profoundly formed by Scripture even if this reality too often remains implicit.

At the explicit level, however, there are problems. That is, when Catholics deliberately study the Bible, they run up against difficulties. In my experience, these difficulties stem from the traditional Catholic teaching that faith is reasonable combined with the uncritical acceptance of an untraditonal notion of reason that is rationalistic and scientistic.

Fr. Giussani expresses the traditional approach to reason succinctly: "the capacity to become aware of reality according to the totality of its factors. The term reasonableness, then, represents a mode of action that expresses and realizes reason, the capacity to become aware of reality" (The Religious Sense, 12). By contrast, reason in its novel and commonplace sense of the word refers narrowly to one or another of the roads (methods) that the human capacity of reason takes in order to come to an awareness of reality.

To confuse this or that method with reason itself is an unreasonable position."

I wonder if, using this definition of "reason," it would be correct to understand the common approach to the academic study of the Bible using the historical critical method exclusively (as occurs, for example, in most university and seminary classrooms) as being unreasonable. I would think so. This post goes on to say:

"The problem I have seen in years of adult education, Catholic Bible study, and in university theology classes is the dominance of one or another of these narrow methods. In my undergrad "Christ in Scriptures" class, we studied three Gospels using the historical-critical method alone.

We learned a great deal about the cultural context of the Gospels and about their philological texture, but any other way of understanding the Gospels was outside the scope of the class. We were left with a pastiche of hypotheses and opinions, and I asked my professor: "where is Christ?" As a professor, she did not want to impose faith on her students, not all of whom were Catholic. She did not seem too interested in proposing Christ to them either. This was not a reasonable approach . . ."

Exactly. This problem, of course, is not limited to Catholic institutions of higher learning nor to the liberal ones from which it came; Evangelical institutions struggle with this sort of unreasonable teaching in a bid for "respectablility" and "approval" from secular liberals. What a waste of time and effort that is. At Tyndale University College we struggle with being academic and faithful, but I think we get it right to a greater degree than most. Students regularly come out of class having been challenged by an encounter with Christ mediated by the text. That is education worth sacrificing for and education that makes a difference. And that seems reasonable.