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Reply to John J. Reilly Here
by John J. Reilly
John Paul II deserves better enemies. When his encyclical, "Fides et Ratio," was released in the middle of October, 1998, the document was indeed front page news, but many commentators seemed to have trouble fitting it into their usual script for what this papacy is supposed to be about. While the prestige media outlets, such as The New York Times and National Public Radio, did report that "Fides et Ratio" treated of the compatibility of faith and reason, they used the publication of the encyclical primarily as an occasion to trot out the usual Catholic-liberal authorities. These sources (Fr. Richard McBrien of Notre Dame comes particularly to mind) then repeated their familiar complaints about the pope's authoritarianism in general and his refusal to modify traditional Catholic sexual ethics in particular. The unquestioned assumption was that John Paul's papacy is an essentially reactionary episode, whose doctrinal statements will inevitably be drowned out by the irresistible current of modernity when his reign ends.
This analysis represents a profound failure of imagination. Whatever else "Fides et Ratio" may be, it is not a reactionary document. Rather, it is nothing less than a project for the reconstruction of the Western mind after modernity (or after "postmodernity," if you prefer). For several centuries, the intellectual life of Christendom has been a process of analysis. It has taken apart the unity that anciently linked metaphysics, ethics, social relations and the natural sciences. The result was a historical explosion that has been both miraculously beneficial and catastrophic without precedent. What "Fides et Ratio" proposes is a way of putting the cooling shrapnel of the Enlightenment explosion back together.
Such a project is hardly unique these days. Advanced physics is greatly occupied with ideas for a "final theory" that would, among other things, unify particle physics and cosmology. Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" proclaimed some years ago that democratic liberalism was the final state of political theory. More recently, Edward O. Wilson, in his book "Consilience," outlined a new unity of knowledge to be based on an expansive interpretation of sociobiology. In "Fides et Ratio," an even more ambitious unity is proposed, one that would include not just natural knowledge but philosophy, metaphysics and even elements of the supernatural.
While this new unity would not simply revive any one metaphysical system of the past, still it would require the reappropriation of some traditional feautures of philosophical systems, such as universality and the knowability of the world, that have been out of fashion, to say the least, for some time. John Paul II essentially restates the Church's own tradition of "right reason" when he asserts that philosophers may with confidence make certain assumptions that are prior to any one philosophy:
"Although times change and knowledge increases, it is possible to discern a core of philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole. Consider, for example, the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and goodness. Consider as well certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by all. These are among the indications that, beyond different schools of thought, there exists a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity."
An element that is new in "Fides et Ratio," at least in emphasis, is the recognition of the dynamic influence that transcendental theism has on intellectual life. The notion is not new, of course. Many philosophers, notably Whitehead, have remarked that Western natural science was made possible in part by the principle of the knowability of the world that Christian theology drew from the dogma of a personal God. In this encyclical, the pope uses this principle to offer all serious intellectual activity a remarkably positive interpretation:
"Revelation therefore introduces into our history a universal and ultimate truth which stirs the human mind to ceaseless effort; indeed, it impels reason continually to extend the range of its knowledge until it senses that it has done all in its power, leaving no stone unturned."
These assertions are certainly jarring in today's philosophical environment, in which the subjectivity of perception and the unreliability of reason are generally taken for granted. In rejecting these assumptions, John Paul II is coming to grips with a threat to the faith that is far more serious than the shallow critiques against personal and social ethics that Catholic dissidents have been occupying themselves with since the Second Vatican Council. Orthodox theology can deal with agnosticism about God. The old-style Enlightenment rationalists, simply by appealing to reason, were always playing in the Church's ball park. What orthodoxy cannot survive is agnosticism about reason itself. That is why, in what may be the closing decades of the Enlightenment, we find the head of the West's central institution enjoining, almost as a duty, what in any other context might be thought to be the defining feature of the Faustian mind:
"[I]n the light of faith which finds in Jesus Christ this ultimate meaning, I cannot but encourage philosophers-be they Christian or not-to trust in the power of human reason and not to set themselves goals that are too modest in their philosophizing. The lesson of history in this millennium now drawing to a close shows that this is the path to follow: it is necessary not to abandon the passion for ultimate truth, the eagerness to search for it or the audacity to forge new paths in the search. It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason."
The point of the philosophical (and scientific) enterprise that John Paul II enjoins in this encyclical is not "progress for the sake of progress." Rather, the goal is a comprehensive intellectual system that will be both universal and true, "a potent underpinning for the true and planetary ethics which the world now needs." While insistent that any true system must necessarily reflect the truths of Catholic dogma, the pope is equally insistent that: "Such a philosophy will be a place where Christian faith and human cultures may meet, a point of understanding between believer and non-believer." The pope outlines three features that the coming philosophy must have:
(1) "To be consonant with the word of God, philosophy needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life. ... " In other words, it must again be possible for philosophy to discern good from bad, and better from worse. Thought must again be able to place values and human activities in a coherent ethical order.
(2) "This prompts a second requirement: that philosophy 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...." The Latin here means "the adjustment of things and the understanding." We need a theory of knowledge that gives us some surety of the objectivity of our knowledge of the world and of the reliability of our thinking processes.
(3) "The two requirements already stipulated imply a third: the need for a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range, capable, that is, of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute, ultimate and foundational in its search for truth...." This is hard, but it may be overdue. I would suggest that the impetus could come from the need to defend the autonomy of science against attacks by postmodernists. Mathematical Platonism in particular has never fit into the post-Kantian world, but it seems more necessary than ever in order to support the sort of science on which a final theory of physics would depend.
So much for the structural outline, but how would such a philosophical system actually work? In many ways, "Fides et Ratio" takes up where Leo XIII's "Aeterni Patris" left off in 1879. John Paul II quotes his predecessor concerning the strength of Thomas Aquinas's philosophy: "Just when Saint Thomas distinguishes perfectly between faith and reason, he unites them in bonds of mutual friendship, conceding to each its specific rights and to each its specific dignity." However, John Paul II also takes care to note that Neo-Thomism is not the whole of Christian philosophy, and neither does he propose it as the universal philosophy of the future. He alludes to other, more recent methods, especially the phenomenology that has so influenced his own thinking. He suggests that these different intellectual approaches may nevertheless allow for a unity of method:
"In this sense, metaphysics should not be seen as an alternative to anthropology, since it is metaphysics which makes it possible to ground the concept of personal dignity in virtue of [humanity's] spiritual nature. In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry."
The problem with any proposal definite enough to be taken seriously is that it is also definite enough to incite objections. The metaphysical and anthropological assumptions that John Paul II prescribes for the universal philosophy are not in fact universally acknowledged, and neither are they self-evidently true. Nevertheless, the Pope insists on their necessity, even for a system specifically intended to accommodate both believers and non-believers. The rationale seems to be that such a system must have certain minimum, substantive prerequisites:
"To believe it possible to know a universally valid truth is in no way to encourage intolerance; on the contrary, it is the essential condition for sincere and authentic dialogue between persons. "
Whatever else you can say about this outline, you must admit that these criteria are positive and specific. Perhaps the most striking thing about "Fides et Ratio" is its lack of defensiveness. There is indeed a short "syllabus of errors" that relates particularly to the postmodern condition. John Paul II criticizes eclecticism, historicism (what C.S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery"), scientism, pragmatism (in the sense of deciding basic ethical questions by social consensus) and nihilism (the rejection of the possibility of philosophical foundations). Aside from these brief condemnations, the encyclical is not against anything. It does not look to the past, or even seek to conserve the present: its orientation is almost wholly toward the future.
So what happens if this future arrives? Suppose that a philosophy of the sort that John Paul II proposes does in fact arise in the course of the 21st century. It might turn out to be nothing more than a "glass bead game," like the engrossing but ultimately futile intellectual exercise in the Hermann Hesse novel. It could, after a generation or two of usefulness, become as mechanical and unsatisfying as much of the textbook Neo-Thomism of the middle 20th century.
On the other hand, assume that the philosophy is spectacularly successful, that it becomes the guiding spirit of the post-Enlightenment world. In that case, it could play a role in Western history similar to the one that Neo-Confucianism played in the history of China after the 12th century. A civilization's philosophical system can become so comprehensive that people fail to notice that it is also closed, and that the society inside is suffocating.
While these outcomes are possible, we should also keep in mind that John Paul II is interested in more than proposing an intellectual project. For several generations, philosophy has become more and more divorced from life, from ordinary ethics, and lately even from the needs of natural science. It is this gap that he seeks to close. By insisting that the life of the mind is necessarily a moral life, he is pointing toward an ethic that might fittingly be final for the West, because it was also first:
"And just as in giving her assent to Gabriel's word, Mary lost nothing of her true humanity and freedom, so too when philosophy heeds the summons of the Gospel's truth its autonomy is in no way impaired. Indeed, it is then that philosophy sees all its enquiries rise to their highest expression. "