THE topic may sound purely intellectual and academic. But I feel it has an immediate and concrete relevance to our life, because it involves something fundamental about ourselves.
How we think and work, how we conduct our business and politics, for example, how we choose our priorities in daily life, etc. are determined by how we resolve the issue involved. It certainly has far-reaching effects.
And though the issue may first be tackled by our intelligentsia, it is not their exclusive concern only. It’s a universal concern! We have a duty, depending on our possibilities, to spread this concern to all. We just have to find the appropriate ways and means.
Reason or our intelligence, our capacity to know, our faculty to think is not just about a highly personal operation that we do, implying a world that we mainly invent, and thus, very subjective. That is, opposed to being objective or real.
This, sadly, is the dominant understanding of this powerful faculty. Detached from an objective law and standard, it becomes vulnerable to our self-seeking motives.
This spiritual power of ours to think and reason out has its proper object and its proper laws that need to be respected and followed. The problem we are having is that these things are neglected more often these days.
The Pope again alerted us about this point in his recent speech to university professors in a conference about the university’s role in the search for a new humanism in Europe.
It’s an ongoing affair, this effort to understand the mystery of man. The problem arises when the definition of man is confined to certain aspects only, and elaborated to their absurd conclusions.
Through history, several attempts have been made to define man. Some have viewed man mainly if not purely on his material and temporal aspects. The spiritual aspects are marginalized. The Pope himself practically says so.
“The crisis of modernity,” he said, “has less to do with modernity’s insistence on the centrality of man and his concerns, than with the problems raised by a humanism that claims to build a ‘kingdom of man’ detached from its necessary ontological foundation.”
That’s high talk, all right. But that reference to “necessary ontological foundation” is about man’s ultimate origin as God’s creature, made a person and not just a thing, with body and soul, and finally as God’s child meant to participate in the very life of God.
The core problem is when man’s reason is misused, and then abused, as when it is made to focus only on tangible or empirical objects, or on what is reasonable alone. Our reason is held captive by a vicious human attitude that ignores the spiritual and supernatural reality.
Beyond the empirical, reason is made to stop working, which is contrary to
its very nature, oriented as it is to the infinite and always in the state of transcending itself. Our intelligence does not know how to say, “enough.”
Thus, the Pope proposed that we broaden the scope of reason “in order to be able to explore and embrace those aspects of reality which go beyond the purely empirical.”
It’s when this is done, he said, that we can have a “more fruitful, complementary approach to the relationship between faith and reason.” A continuing dialogue between faith and reason takes place. This is a concern we have to learn to be more aware of. We have to sustain that dialogue always.
Our reasoning is led to the world of faith, and faith becomes partly reasonable, and definitely not just a myth, a figment of one’s imagination. Faith assumes a realism based on an objective truth.
It is with this attitude to reason and faith that Christianity’s contribution to modern humanism can be appreciated. Faith is then clothed in reason and can be deepened and presented in ways attuned to modernity’s sensibilities.
This is how we can be transformed spiritually so we can live out our vocation as children of God in the middle of the world. For a humanism without faith is a truncated humanism.
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