From Regensburg to the College des Bernardins:
In the relationship between faith and reason,
truth is never simply theoretical
by Adriano Dell'Asta
Translated from
the 10/18/09 issue of
October 18, 2009
Today, Oct. 18, an international conference ends in Bergamo on the "Seekers of the eternal, creators of civilization: Monasticism in East and West", organized by the Fondazione Russia Cristiana. Here is a substantial extract from one of the papers delivered.
"Not to act according to reason is contrary to the nature of God".
That is one of the statements that is most repeated and impassioned from Benedict XVI's Regensburg lecture, because the separation of faith and reason, as history has shown, gives birth to the conditions for the destruction of man in his fullness.
It could be the idea of a God capable of doing without Logos and acting with or against Logos, an idea that has begun to make inroads among Christians themselves, in forms of voluntarism which later turn into true and proper irrationalism.
It could be the idea of man who feigns to be closed to any question that has to do with the eternal and universal, and is thus able to isolate reason from any problem that is not clearly utilitarian.
Whichever is the favored pole of such a separation - faith or reason -the outcome is always the same: The destruction of man, humiliated in his reason, because wanting to emancipate himself from God, he has limited himself to that which is 'verifiable by experiment". And offended in his faith, because wanting to preserve the purity of the divine, he pushes God off "far from us in pure and impenetrable voluntarism' and ends up rendering him extraneous to the human being and incapable of saying anything to him.
From the time man proclaimed as rationally insignificant "the fundamental questions of his reason", namely, the questions about truth and the sense of life, the inevitable outcome of such an aversion was the dissolution of the image of man.
The risk persists to this day when mankind, after the collapse of the totalitarianisms, is besieged by what Benedict XVI calls "the threatening pathologies of religion and reason" - fundamentalist violence and atheist nihilism.
One cannot but be struck by the similarity of this context with that outlined by the Russian Soloviev. Though in a completely different context - without having behind him the tragedies that the 20th century brought mankind - the great Russian philosopher noted that rational and material principles, when they claim to be emancipated from God and to be affirmable even in solitude, each to his own, can only end in self-negation, abandoning man and the world to insensibility, to idealistic reason which becomes a logical principle when, in giving matter absolute value, it transforms it into the principal subject of existence.
Indeed, this argumentation by Soloviev was not anti-modern, characterized as it was by a great respect for philosophy and the Western sciences. In this sense, instead of opposing each other, reason and faith find in Christianity, and more precisely in Christ, their authentic truth. Indeed, seeking to explain his own return to the faith, Soloviev says the motivation was precisely the demands of reason.
If one rejects the claim that reason can do without faith, it is not to defend faith but rather to save reason and have it conform to its own calling.
And such is Benedict XVI's desire when he reminds us that the goal aimed for by his reconstructing the relationship between reason and faith is certainly not a negation of modern reason but rather "a widening of our concept of reason and of its uses".
Another element one cannot but be struck with is the fact that this discourse, besides not being anti-modern at all, is made by Christians who do not judge or condemn, but make themselves co-responsible for what can happen if man is not educated to grasp his own origins and believes himself to be the master of truth.
It must not be ignored that in this respect, Benedict XVI begins his critique of modern reason by denouncing "pure and impenetrable voluntarism" which was born in late medieval Christian theology, making man and his reason count for nothing in the face of the will of God and the whims of those who claim to interpret this will.
When this presumption prevails, the Church becomes an ivory tower, itself "pure and impenetrable", which not only no longer has anything to say to the world, but also condemns it to perdition.
"The idea of perfection without grace leads to nihilism," Berdjaev wrote shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution - and the revolutionaries were certainly guilty of such nihilism. But all those who wished to preserve the 'divine purity of earthly miseries' were no less guilty, for not being able to educate that thirst for the absolute and for justice which, having received no response from the established institutions, led to revolution.
The duty of repentance which must concern everyone at this point certainly does not mean a flattening out nor an equiparation of sins and responsibilities, nor does it imply renouncing to tell the truth or give a precise judgment on various levels of responsibility.
Just that truth is no longer an abstract argument of which man can be the creator and master, but something to which one must respond, to which one must be responsible, and which must be guarded at all costs.
The subject of guarding the truth is precisely that which opens the address that Benedict XVI would have given at La Sapienza University in January 2008, in which he would have presented himself as the pastor and overseer, the man who takes care of the community, "of the right path and the cohesion of the flock", keeping the human community united and "on the right path towards God".
Above all, it must be noted that the truth of which Benedict XVI presents himself as guardian and custodian is not the product of any theoretical elaboration. More precisely, the Pope says, "truth is never merely theoretical" - it is an experience.
In fact, the Pope "speaks as the representative of a community which guards in itself a treasure of knowledge and ethical experiences that are important for the entire human community".
This experience is precisely that of a journey, but a very particular one, because the path on which man journeys is at the same time Him towards whom the journey leads.
Truth is therefore the experience of life with Him and in Him towards whom one journeys: a life with Christ and in Christ, communion with a Truth which, being friendly to man, is Good.
Central to the discourse of the experience of truth is the continuing articulation between the certainty of the truth in one's custody and the demand of a continuing search for this same truth that no single answer can satisfy. But as Benedict XVI said at the College des Bernardins, this search for the truth is, for the Christian, never "an expedition to a trackless desert".
What allows the Christian to overcome the apparently insurmountable contradiction between the search for truth and experiencing it is, in fact, Christ who is both the companion adn the way for man's journey.
At this point, once more, we can turn to Soloviev who in one of his earlier works presented the Chalcedonian formula of 'without confusion and without separation' as the instrument to overcome the dead ends of thinking (in his case, he was speaking particularly of the Kantian opposition between phenomenon and the thing-in-itself). Beyond the immediate coincidence, one also notes that Soloviev defines this solution as the 'royal road' to knowledge.
'Royal road' seems a strange term to use, and may even seem inappropriate, except that it evokes the royal doors to the iconostasis
[the wall of icons that separates the sanctuary from the rest of the church in Orthodox temples], through which pass the Gospel, the Eucharist, and therefore Christ himself, who is the way and the goal of our searching.
Above all, 'royal road' is an expression adopted by Christian tradition to describe monastic life and its principal characteristic, which is to make man's search for God overcome the dissipation of those who do not know what they are in search of, and to lead them to unite themselves to God alone.
It is therefore evident that by using this term, Soloviev was expressing the very precise idea according to which the man who desires to know reality in all its facets but without dissipation, vices, excesses, fantasies or vain thoughts - in short, in continuous search of a precise and certain goal - must follow not the private, tortuous and dangerous path of his own thinking, but that which has already been traced to lead directly to the Lord of all reality.
So, beyond a hopeless contradiction, we come to an experience of unity in which nothing is lost: a unity that starts from that of faith and reason to extend to all the spheres of being.
Soloviev's suggestion of the 'royal road' urges us on to a third discourse by Benedict XVI. Integral knowledge requires what the Russians call
tselomudrie, a term which literally means 'integral knowledge' but which actually signifies 'virginity', therefore one of those principal characteristics of monastic life, which is the subject of Benedict XVI's third major discourse
[on faith and reason, which he delivered at the College des Bernardins on Sept. 12, 2008, two years after the Regensburg lecture].
He opens by underscoring how the monks saved ancient culture and created out of it, a new one even if this was not their purpose. Not less underscored is the statement that Christianity is not 'a religion of the book'.
To this double insistence on the subordinate place of culture in monastic life, corresponds a series of equally repeated statements on the value of "formation of reason", of 'erudition' and even of 'grammar' as instruments without which it would have been impossible "to perceive the Word, in the midst of words".
In the same way, Benedict XVI insists on the value of interpretation. He cites an old saying, "Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria" ("Words demonstrate facts: what must be believed is said in allegory).
Thus we have the apparent paradox of reason, which although subordinate to faith, also is shown immediately to be indispensable for the full comprehension of the contents of the experience of faith.
But a paradox only if one has not followed Benedict XVI who has shown that opposing faith and reason to each other is fatal for man, and how such an opposition is possible only when both faith and reason are denatured - that is, when faith is understood as a violent imposition which negates reason, and when reason is understood as the free exercise of subjectivity.
The perspective opened by Benedict XVI is completely different when he explains that if 'words can kill' and one needs the Spirit, the Spirit is really 'the Spirit of the Lord', Christ, and therefore, true interpretation, far from being arbitrary, is characterized by "a link superior to the letter: the link between intellect and love".
True interpretation, just as one has said of the experience of truth, is what one has by being with Christ and walking along the way that He himself constitutes: the eternal who has entered time, the unsayable mystery which became flesh - visible, describable and reasonable - the Word made flesh.
Only such a God deserves to be proclaimed because, Benedict XVI says, "a God who is simply thought up and invented is not a God". But "the novelty of the Christian announcement does not consist in a thought but in a fact: He showed himself. Not a blind fact but a fact which is Logos itself".
This fact is reasonable, but reason should have the humility to accept it and not presume to be its creator and master. In this way, a space of freedom opens up that is not one of randomness or absence of links, but, rather one of love.
Even the subject of the Christian announcement, its credibility, and more important, its possibility, can be seen in the particular light of the Russian experience in the 20th century.
The triumph of ideology and the millions of deaths which that fact produced in the two totalitarian experiences of Nazism and Communism seem to have made impossible and even unacceptable not just any announcement of truth but even any discourse over truth, which was used as a claim to a mastery over reality and, in these totalitarian regimes, the destruction of truth itself.
This claim to dominion was so totalizing and destructive that the evil arising from it had no alternative but an equally totalizing rejection of any truth whatsoever.
When Theodor Adorno made his famous aphorism over the impossibility of writing any more poetry after Auschwitz, he was conditioned precisely by the apparent insurmountability of the alternative: In the face of the extreme experiences of the 20th century, in the face of pain and 'atrocious death', any form of expression (esthetic or otherwise, it makes no difference) would seem an outrage to suffering, like an attempt to annul the scandal of the unspeakable by speaking it out and thus placing it at our disposition.
Behind this fear lay hidden a new form of iconoclasm which ends up once again by denying that the infinite can be demonstrated through the finite.
To this dispute over the possibility of speaking the truth, never more radical than in times of iconoclasm, the experience of the concentration camps, as narrated in great Russian literature, has given a similarly radical answer: the century has told us that men can remain men - the unsayable has been said, that man has within him something infinite and irreducible, precisely where everything seemed to have come to an end and where it seemeed that the most total reduction of man himself had been realized.
But the unsayable that was said was not created by man as a new form of ideological domination, as Adorno feared, who could not conceive an interpretation that is free but not arbitrary, nor a truth that is incontrovertible but not totalitarian: this unsayable, which defines man as he most properly is, is something man cannot even imagine.
Just as authentic interpretation is possible by not substituting nor negating mystery but trusting in it, so is the art of giving space to the infinite and to the mystery that makes things worthy to be preserved: the art of 'the immortality of life", in the words of Varlam Shalamov
[Russian writer, poet and Gulag survivor, 1907-1982].
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/10/2009 15:46]