Reason and Love

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

"Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is," Pope Benedict XVI has written in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, a book I expect to read as soon as my public library can fetch it on inter-library loan. Meanwhile, I am engaging in a pursuit of the pope's thought as seen through the eyes of Catholic explicator George Weigel, one of whose recent columns, "To the rescue, again," is a big help.

The article is only indirectly about the Holy Father's ideas concerning rationality. It is, rather, a paean to the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love,” to borrow another of Benedict XVI's phrases.

As I have discussed in earlier installments in this "Divine Reason" series, Benedict XVI has proposed that the gaze of the Christian West needs to put reason back at the center of its visual field. But one is entitled to ask whether reason is the be-all and end-all of Christian values — and if not, what is?

Weigel's article makes clear that the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love," as revealed in Christ via the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, is, if not the be-all, the end-all:

The reason of God, the Logos through whom all things were made, calls us beyond reason to love. Walking the Way of the Cross, Jesus reaches the end of the road of the world’s rationality — and becomes, thereby, a stumbling block and a folly. But a more ample “reason” is at work here: the logic of love, carried out to infinity. That is what bursts the bounds of the tomb on Easter morning. The tomb is empty. The world has been suffused with the power of divine love, which is the most living thing there is.

The “scandal” of the Cross, as it is spoken of in the New Testament, is for Weigel "not a scandal against reason; it is a scandal beyond reason." I am glad he drew that distinction, for it is one which allows reason to remain firmly at the center of the Christian outlook, even as divine love wreathes it all about at the leading edge of an expansion toward infinity.


I am put in mind of what can happen to certain garden plants that under adverse circumstances tend to die off at their centers, even as their outer parts flourish. This is not good, for without a healthy middle, a plant will soon die. The cure is often to feed the roots.

Pope Benedict is saying that we need to fertilize the roots of the "plant" of Christianity, whose soil is made of reason. This emphasis on reason is not an affront to Christian love. It is its restoration and salvation.