To Reason Is Divine

As I hinted in The Pope of Reason and The Pope and Islam, I nurture a late-blooming respect for the now-leader of my church, Pope Benedict XVI. For tutelage in his thought, I've turned to the recent writings of Catholic ethicist/author George Weigel, many shorter ones of which may be found here. One of them, "Pope Benedict XVI: The Master-Teacher," does an excellent job of laying out the Holy Father's views on the future of Europe and the Judeo-Christian West vis-à-vis the present threats from Islamic fundamentalism.

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In this article originally written for The Catholic Herald in the U.K., Weigel emphasizes the book which the pope published in 2006 under his birth name, Joseph Ratzinger. In Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, which I have yet to read, the then-cardinal (per Weigel) "distils a lifetime of reflection on the relationship between faith and reason, and on the cultural consequences of a collapse of both faith and reason, into a challenge of prime importance for the entire world — but especially for Europe, in its current crisis of civilisational morale."

This pope is making quite a few pointed assertions these days about rationality and reason being part and parcel of the Christian faith. I'm inquiring into his ideas in part because I'd like to know more about what he means by reason.


Along those lines, Weigel alludes to the lecture Benedict XVI made last year at Regensburg, Germany, in which

... the Pope warned his listeners that an unreasonable faith is a real and present danger to the world — a faith, for example, in which God can be imagined capable of commanding the irrational, like the murder of innocents. But so, the Pope argued ..., is a loss of faith in reason: that, too, is a real and present danger. If, for example, the West limits the concept of "reason" to a purely instrumental rationality, or, in a fit of post-modern self-indulgence, denies the human capacity to grasp the truth of anything with certainty, then the West will be unable to defend itself. Why? Because it will be unable to give an account of its political commitments and their moral foundations, to itself, or to those who would replace the free societies of the West with a very different pattern of human community, based on a very different idea of God — and, consequently, of the just society.

The Pope seems to feel that cutting our traditional anchor line to divine reason in the Christian West could sap our ability to stave off the forces of unreason in the Muslim East. Historical trends we moderns have inherited from the Age of Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe are sawing away at that line.

Stripped to its essentials, the story seems to be that denizens of the Christian West at one time believed implicitly in "the human capacity to grasp the truth ... with certainty." Over the last two or three centuries that confidence has eroded into an attitude of skepticism toward the knowability of truth in general and of moral truth in particular. The pope would like us at least to reclaim our patrimony of truth-seeking reason ... even those of us who do not believe in God.

Weigel says the Holy Father "lays down a challenge" to religious nonbelievers today:

"In the age of the Enlightenment, the attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms of morality by saying that they would be valid etsi Deus non daretur, even if God did not exist... [Today], we must... reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment and say: Even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice I should like to give to our friends today who do not believe. This does not impose limitations on anyone's freedom; it gives support to all our human affairs and supplies a criterion of which human life stands sorely in need."

I suspect the pope believes that living a moral life based on rational principles — living "as if God did indeed exist" — might bring even agnostics under God's spell, since (as I indicated in The Pope of Reason) he feels that reason or logos lies at the very core of God's nature. "Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is," Benedict has written in his book. Logos, the Greek word for creative reason, was the one selected by the evangelist for the prologue to his Gospel of John.

In future posts in this, my "Divine Reason" series, I intend to explore Pope Benedict XVI's ideas about the place of reason in Christian faith and Western thought more thoroughly.