Our reason needs the faith

WE have to understand this point well. Being the faculty

we use to know and later to love, our reason just cannot be beholden

to the data provided by our senses and our own understanding of

things.

            That would confine our reasoning to the world of the

sensible and the intelligible, that is, to the world of matter and of

ideas. Thus conditioned, our reason cannot go beyond those levels and

would miss the world of the spiritual and the supernatural. It would

get trapped in some subjective mode as opposed to what is objective.

            It’s important that we do some disciplining to our

reasoning because it tends to get contented only with the sensible and

the intelligible in the many forms that they come and attract us. It

can willingly let itself be held hostage by these dimensions of

reality.

            We know that our reason does not create the truth. It does

not create the reality. It can only apprehend, reflect, process and

transmit the truth and reality. It will always depend on a reality

that is outside and independent of itself.

            And reality just cannot be sensible and intelligible. A

lot more goes into it than what our senses can perceive and our

intelligence can discern and understand. Our reason itself, if used

properly, can acknowledge that at the limits of its capability, it can

discern a world that is beyond the physical and the ideal.

            No matter how perceptive and intelligent we are, we can

always detect that there is another world that is beyond the sensible

and the intelligible. This is the world where our senses and

intelligence cannot anymore cope.

            This is where we need to humble ourselves, a predicament

that many of us find hard to resolve. We tend to hold on only to our

own ideas and the facts and data that we can manage to gather, guided

mainly by our senses and intellect. In short, we make our own selves,

and to be more specific, our own senses and intellect, to be our own

sole guide, our own god.

            We have to do something drastic about this. And the first

thing we can do is to let our faith and trust in our human authorities

to go to its ultimate level, that is, to have faith and trust in a

living God who is infinitely above our natural way of knowing.

            In other words, we have to see to it that our first and

indispensable need is God from whom all of us and the entire creation

come and to whom we all belong. We have to show this by developing an

abiding sense of piety where everything that we have in this life

should point us to God. We have to break loose from a certain mindset

that confines and restricts us to the natural level of things made of

physical objects and ideas.

            We have to see to it that our reasoning is always in need

of faith which, as the Letter to the Hebrews describes it, “is the

substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

(11,1) It’s God’s way of sharing with us what he knows about himself,

about ourselves and about the whole creation. It’s a gift that we have

to take care of.