Faith And Reason
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGEOver a hundred years ago the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte distinguished three phases in the historical evolution of human thought: the theological-fictive; the metaphysical-abstract; the positive. Gradually the positivist form of thinking would come to be applied to all departments of reality. Finally even the most complicated and least comprehensible department, the ultimate, longest defended citadel of theology, would be successfully subjected to positivist scientific analysis and exposition. Moral phenomena and man himself - his essential human nature - would become subject matter for the positive sciences. Here, too, the mystery of the theologians would have to lose ground to the advance of positivist thinking. In the end it would be possible to develop even a "social physics," no less exact than the physics that charts the inanimate world. In the process, the realm of the priest would ultimately vanish, and questions about the nature of reality be handed over totally to the competence of scholars. In the wake of this development, the question about God's existence would of necessity become obsolete, discarded and left behind by man's mind as quite simply meaningless. Just as today it never occurs to anyone to deny the existence of the Homeric gods, because the question about their existence is not even taken seriously, so when thinking had finally assumed the positivist form, the question about the existence of God himself to be asked. For this reason Comte spared himself the excitement of a war against God, such as other great atheists before and after his day have waged with the utmost passion. Comte simply strode calmly on towards the post-theistic age. Moreover, in his late period he applied himself at great length to the task of drafting a new religion for mankind, for although - as he affirmed – man can live without God, he cannot live without religion.(1) It seems incontrovertible that today the mentality described by Comte is that of a very large section of human society. The question about God no longer finds any place in human thought. To take up a well-known saying of Laplace, the context of the world is self-contained and the hypothesis of God is no longer necessary for its comprehension. Even the faithful, like travelers on a sinking ship, are becoming widely affected by an uneasy feeling: they are asking if the Christian faith has any future, or if it is not, in fact, more and more obviously being made obsolete by intellectual evolution. Behind such notions is the sense that a great gulf is developing between the world of faith and the world of science - a gulf that cannot be bridged, so that faith is made very largely impracticable. Let us take a look at the general picture and see where the critical points are to be found. The difficulty begins with the very first page of the Bible. The concept presented there of how the world came to be is in direct contradiction of all that we know today about the origins of the universe; and even if the word has got around that these passages in the Bible are not meant to be a textbook of natural science, and so need not be taken as a literal description of how the universe came to be, still, an uneasy feeling remains: the fear that this explanation is a retrospective evasion, unsupported by the original texts themselves. And the problem continues, almost page by page, as we read on through the Bible. There is the clay, moulded into a man by the hand of God, and then, close upon it, the picture of woman formed out of the side of the sleeping man -- flesh of his flesh and companion to comfort his loneliness. Today we may be learning how to re-appraise this imagery as a profoundly symbolic utterance about human nature, as pictures, the truth of which lies on a plane totally different from that upon which biology and the theory of descent operate. We may now see these pictures as indeed expressing truth, but a truth that is deeper and more concerned with man's essential humanity than are the truths of natural science, exact and important as the latter may be. This may well be, but in the very next chapter new problems emerge with the story of the Fall. How can one bring this into harmony with the knowledge that -- on the evidence of natural science man starts not from above, but from below, does not fall, but slowly rises, even now having only just accomplished the metamorphosis from animal to human being? And what of paradise? Long before man existed, pain and death were in the world. Thistles and thorns grew long before any man had set eyes on them. And another thing: the first man was scarcely self-conscious, knew only privation and the wearisome struggle to survive. He was far from possessing the full endowment of reason, which the old doctrine of paradise attributes to him. But once the picture of paradise and the Fall has been broken in pieces, the notion of original sin goes with it, to be followed logically, it would seem, by the notion of redemption as well. Obviously we might here employ arguments similar to those we have already used concerning the divine potter who infused spirit into the clay of the earth, to create man. Here, too, I say, we make it apparent that the truth about man goes deeper than the conclusions of biology. From the biological point of view man starts off from below; but it is still not by any means clear whether man really starts from below, or whether perhaps his true beginning, the point of departure of the essence of humanity, is not above -- to speak in pictures, the symbolism of which is still meaningful for us, even if our universe has long since ceased to acknowledge fixed points of reference, "above," "below," "right" and "left" having become interchangeable according to the standpoint of the calculating observer. But it is always difficult to apply such arguments as these: the operation belongs beyond the horizon of our normal thinking, which tends rather to come up at this point with a firm refutation. Let us continue, therefore, to expound these problems and contradictions that oppress the common mind, in order to measure up the utmost severity of the whole problem which emerges under the title "Faith and Knowledge." After the Fall the problem continues with the biblical picture of history, which goes on at once to portray Adam as living in a cultural phase dated about 4,000 BC This date does in fact agree with biblical chronology which allows some four thousand years from creation until Christ. Today everybody knows, however, that before this phase was reached, hundreds of thousands of years of human life and effort had already run their course, and these find no place in the biblical historical picture, which is set strictly within the framework of ancient eastern thought. This brings us to the next problem: the Bible, venerated by faith as the word of God, has been disclosed to us, by historical-critical scholarship, as a thoroughly human book. Not only are its literary forms those of the world that produced it, but its manner of thought, even in respect of genuinely religious topics, has been determined by the world in which it arose. Are we still able to believe in the God who called out to Moses from the burning bush, who smote the first-born of Egypt, who led his people in war against the Canaanites, who struck down Uzzah dead because he dared to put out his hand to steady the Ark of the Covenant? For us, is all of this not just the ancient East -- interesting, and significant, perhaps, as a ' phase in human consciousness, but only a phase in human consciousness, not the expression of divine utterance? One can recall, it is true, how Pascal, one of the great minds in the evolution of the natural sciences, sewed into the lining of his coat a piece of paper bearing these words: "The God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, not of the philosophers." His experience had been precisely of an anthropomorphic God, of a God who was close to man, of a God who spoke and acted and loved and was angry. It was only in such a God that he had at last discovered the authentic divinity of God in contrast to the artifacts of human speculation; but how long he suffered before he saw the fire of the burning bush shining through all the curiosities of the Old Testament, and heard the voice of the living God! Which of us has the strength or the patience to endure such suffering and find such an experience, so often contradicted by appearance? For all the miraculous stories of the Old Testament are still there, not so much a sign of to it, and the faith for us today as an obstacle expression of a cosmology which regards the universe as ruled by all manner of spirits, not in accordance with fixed laws, but by caprice, so that miracles seem every bit as normal as they are alien in a world ruled by rational principles. Let us now pass to the New Testament. There can be no doubt that it moves us much more deeply than the Old. The spirit that pervades it still appeals to us immediately, in contrast to the frequently grisly and uncanny stories contained in not a few of the Old Testament texts. But, in the last analysis, the demand it makes upon us is even greater. All of history now becomes linked up to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. A single man is supposed to be the center of all history -- the watershed of human destiny. Is this not the naive claim of an age that was simply incapable of penetrating the vastness of the universe, the greatness of history and of the world? Is Indian philosophy not nearer the mark when it speaks of a multiplicity of Avataras of God, of divine descents, in each of which a new fragment of the eternal is revealed, or in each of which the eternal reveals itself to the temporal; but in such a way that none of these is God himself in his unsurpassable and necessary form? Indian philosophers do not hesitate to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as an Avatara of God, just like Krishna, Buddha, and many others. These are all divine epiphanies, reflection in time of the eternal. In every one of these something of God is made visible; they all bring God close to man; but none of them is God. They are like the color of the rainbow: refractions of one light, none excluding any other, all interdependent.(2) How pious that all sounds, and how intelligible when compared with the claim of the Christian faith: Jesus is God, true man and true God, not just an epiphany, but the substance of the eternal, through whom God binds himself radically and irrevocably to the world. I am firmly convinced that the dispute so much in vogue today about the virgin birth is merely an evasion of the real problem, for a God who is able to become man can also be born of a virgin, thereby providing a sign of his uniqueness. But can God be man - a man, completely human, and at the same time true God and hence entitled to demand faith from all and in all ages? Or is this not simply a case of putting too high a value on a moment from the past? Once again are we not encountering a view of the universe that we no longer share: the earth as the floor of the universe, with the arch of heaven above, so that the earth is indeed the lowest and the most insignificant part, and yet the foundation of everything, thus the most reasonable site for the encounter between the Creator and his creation? Even if one is prepared to accept in principle the notion of the incarnation of God, the claim made by the Christian faith still has a question to face: Why did God not bear plainer testimony to himself? Why did he not make himself perceptible to all, so that every man might clearly recognize him and be able to say - "There is God"? The list of difficulties that seem to make faith and knowledge irreconcilable continues as soon as we cross the threshold of the New Testament and step onto the road of Church -history., First comes the question: Where precisely is the Church? Which of the contesting parties ought one to support? Were there from the very start merely conflicting confessions, so that men have always been offered no more than the choice of some partial Christianity or been set the task of seeking Christianity behind or in spite of the Churches? At all events, the claim of the several Churches seems to be called in question by their mutual conflict, which diminishes their reliability and credibility. And then the problems we have already indicated are continued in the problems of the Church's teaching. Does the dogma of the Trinity really express the faith of the Bible, or is it not rather the product of the Greek mind, which thus gratifies its thirst for speculation? Whatever the answer to that question, we still have to ask: What exactly does it mean when we say that God is three-in-one? Does this affirm a reality that means anything to us today? Jumping over all the other affirmations of the Patristic age that present obstacles to us today, let us take but a single example from medieval dogma, one that recently has aroused much interest: the doctrine of transubstantiation, of the essential change of the eucharistic offerings. As it is, the subtle meaning of this definition can be represented by the ordinary intellect only in a rough and ready manner, so that what is indicated is bound to seem for ever unattainable, especially as there is the additional difficulty, that the medieval concept of substance has long since become inaccessible to us. In so far as we use the concept of substance at all today we understand thereby the ultimate particles of matter, and the chemically complex mixture that is bread certainly does not fall into that category. And even if reflection is able patiently to clarify many things here, the question remains: Why must it all be so complicated? Does the very fact that this can be grasped only through a multiplicity of complicated interpretations not suggest that here we have something obsolete and possessing no present power? And this - so it seems to me - is where we last come up against the real uneasiness that we men of today feel when we consider the juxtaposition of faith and knowledge; and it is also the point at which we may attempt to feel around for an answer. The thing about the Christian faith that really troubles us is very largely the burden of the plethora of definitions, which have accumulated in the course of history and which now present themselves to men, all demanding the assent of faith. That our immediate difficulty lies here can be seen from the extraordinary sympathetic resonance that is aroused when an author seems to penetrate the multiplicity of definitions, and resolve them all in the unity of a simple assent of faith. Over and over again we hear how this book or that lecture has produced a liberating effect; and this shows plainly that men today feel the form of faith as a burden, and yet at the same time are inspired by the desire to believe, otherwise they would find it quite easy simply to drop the whole thing without more ado. And so, any liberation by theologians that gives people the feeling that they still remain within the fabric of the faith is not questioned. Paradoxical as it may seem, the days in which we live are very much characterized by a yearning for faith: the world of planned economy, of research, of exact calculation and experiment is quite obviously not enough to satisfy people. Fundamentally, people want to be liberated from this just as much as from the old-fashioned faith which, by its contradiction of modern knowledge, has become such an oppressive burden to them. But it could not be a burden if we did not feel ourselves somehow affected or moved by it, and that there is something here that we must pursue further. We will have to reflect a little longer on this curious situation in which the man of today finds himself, before we attempt to define the real meaning of faith, for our life today is marked not only by dissatisfaction with faith, but equally by dissatisfaction with the world .of science. Only if we describe this double dissatisfaction - not foreseen by Auguste Comte - will we provide a reasonably fair representation of the presuppositions of the problem of faith and knowledge today. The curious thing about the time in which we live is this: the moment in which modern thought becomes self-sufficient is the very moment in which its dissatisfaction becomes most apparent, and it inevitably falls a prey to relativism. We will have to consider this point in more detail in chapter three; meantime, however, a brief mention will suffice. Positivism, which emerged at first as a demand for a particular method to be adopted within the exact sciences, has now very largely taken possession of philosophy -- thanks to the impact made by Wittgenstein. But this means that today both natural science and philosophy no longer seek truth, but only inquire about the correctness of the methods applied, and experiment in logic, chiefly in linguistic analysis, quite independently of the question whether the starting point of this form of thinking corresponds to reality. In any case, reality seems to be inaccessible.
The renunciation of truth itself, and a reliance upon what is verifiable and upon the correctness of methods are typical of the modern natural scientific outlook. Man now operates only within his own shell; the intensification of his methods of observation has not led him to become liberated from himself and to press on to the foundation of things, but has made him instead the prisoner of his own methods, of himself. If literature can be taken as the index of the common mind, we are led to a disquieting diagnosis of man's situation today. The vast literature of absurdity makes very obvious the crisis of our concept of reality. Truth, reality itself, is eluding man. In the language of the title of the last book by Gunter Gass, man seems to be drugged by narrow topicality, capable of perceiving only the tattered rags of reality; he is insecure most of all at the point where exact science abandons him, and it is the measure of his abandonment that first makes him aware of how narrow the slice of reality is in which science gives him security. It is true that this feeling has not become universal by a long way. Even events need time for completion, as Nietzsche observed in his aphorism about the death of God, when he proclaimed in moving imagery the absurd man and an absurd reality as consequences of that event -- consequences which he acclaimed with intoxicated passion. Today at the most sensitive points of society, that is in literature and its portrayal of man, we are beginning to find an unexpected verification of the gruesome visions of Dostoievsky of a world without God, and of how that world turns into a madman's dream. (3) The man who wants to limit himself to what is knowable in exact terms is caught up in the crisis of reality: he beholds the withdrawal of truth. Within himself he hears the cry of faith, which the spirit of the hour has not been able to stifle, but has only made all the more dramatic. There is a cry for liberation from the prison of positivism, as there is, too, for liberation from a form of faith that has allowed itself to become a burden instead of the vehicle of freedom. This brings us at last to the point at which the question can be put: How is such a faith to be created? First let us remark: faith is not a diluted form of natural science, an ancient or medieval preparatory stage that must vanish when the real thing turns up, but is something essentially different. It is not provisional knowledge, although we do use the word in this sense also when we say, for example, "I believe that is so." In such a case "believing" means "being of the opinion." But when we say, "I believe you," the word acquires quite another meaning. It means the same as, "I trust you," or even as much as, "I rely upon you." The you, in which I put reliance, provides me with a certainty that is different from but no less than the certainty that comes from calculation and experiment. And it is thus that the word is used in the Christian Credo. The basic form of Christian faith is not: I believe something, but I believe you. Faith is a disclosure of reality that is granted only to him who trusts, loves, and acts as a human being; and as such it is not a derivative of knowledge, but is sui generis, like knowledge, although it is indeed more basic and more central to our authentically human nature than knowledge is. 'This insight has important consequences; and these can be liberating, if taken seriously. For this means that faith is not primarily a colossal edifice of numerous supernatural facts, standing like a curious second order of knowledge alongside the realm of science, but an assent to God who gives us hope and confidence. Obviously this assent to God is not without content: it is confidence in the fact that he has revealed himself in Christ and that we may now live safe in the assurance that God is like Jesus of Nazareth, in the certainty, that is, that God is looking after the world - and me in it. We will have to consider this definition of content more closely in the next chapter. It is already clear, however, that the content is not comparable with a system of knowledge, but represents the form of our trust. For this reason all does not depend, in the last analysis, upon knowing or comprehending every last detail of the separate facets of the faith.(4) Obviously, for the sake of preaching, it is important for the Church to persevere in trying to gain ever fresh understanding even of the details; and there can be no doubt that such a practice will have a progressively enriching effect - as, for example, when it becomes clear that the affirmation that the world proceeded from the Word does not contradict the affirmation that the world formed in an expansion of matter, for each affirmation conveys truth of a totally different kind about the world. And we could follow out this principle in respect of all of the problems already mentioned. In all of these efforts, however, one must always bear in mind that every age has its own blind-spot, that none can grasp everything, so that in each particular age much has to remain unexplained, because quite simply, the intellectual apparatus is lacking. This is a situation by no means peculiar to theology. Physics acquires its knowledge, among other ways, by formulating a hypothesis from many individual observations which explains these phenomena in terms of a whole, sets them in a total context and permits further advance from the point reached. The more phenomena that are explained, the better the hypothesis. But decisive advance is made only when observations are made that do not fit into any previous hypothesis. It is precisely the errant-phenomena that are important. These compel further study- until finally a new context emerges and a new hypothesis is produced which advances beyond the present horizon and gives us a new, more comprehensive view of reality. The same sort of thing happens in thinking about the faith: one is constantly find oneself in new unresolved situations that present trouble but also hope. Our thinking can never completely integrate faith and knowledge and we must never, from a very understandable impatience, allow ourselves to press on to immature syntheses, which, instead of serving faith, well and truly, compromise it. This applies most of all to the particular: the assent of faith as such is concerned with the whole, and only secondarily has it to do with the part, with the separate contents to which faith assents. A man remains a Christian as long as he makes the effort to give the central assent, as long as he tries to utter the fundamental Yes of trust, even if he is unable to fit in or resolve many of the details. There will be moments in life when, in all kinds of gloom and darkness, faith falls back upon the simple, "Yes, I believe you, Jesus of Nazareth; I believe that in you was revealed that divine purpose which allows me to live with confidence, tranquility, patience, and courage." As long as this core remains in place, a man is living by faith, even if for the moment he finds many of the details of faith obscure and impractical. Let us repeat: at its core faith is not a system of knowledge, but trust. Christian faith is: "the discovery of a You, who supports me and, despite all the inadequacies and final frustration of human encounter, gives me a promise of indestructible love, which not only longs for, but grants, eternity. Christian faith lives not by giving objective meaning, but by the fact that this meaning knows me and loves me so that I can entrust myself to it with the attitude of a child, who knows that all his problems are safe with the You who is his mother. And so, in the end, faith, trust, and love are one, and all the specific details embraced by faith are but concretizations of the all-supporting movement of the 'I believe in you' - of the discovery of God in the face of the man Jesus of Nazareth."(5)
(1) --- On Comte cf. H. de Lubac, The
Tragedy of Humanism
(2) --- Cf. J. Neuner, "Das Christusmysterium und die
Indische Lehre von den Avat-ra", in : A. Grillmeier—H. Bacht, Das
Konzil von Chalkedon III (Wurzburg, 1954), pp. 785-824; C. Regamey,
"Die Religionen Indiens" in: F. Konig, Christus und die
Relgionen der Erde III (Vienna 2, 1956), pp. 73-227, but especially pp.
157-162.
(3) --- On Dostoyesvsky on this topic cf. de Lubac, op. cit.
pp. 217-323.
(4) --- This is taken for granted again and again in the
medieval Summas also. Cf., for example, Bonaventure, Sent III d 25 a
1 q 3: Credere autem omnes articulos explicite et distincte … non est
de generali fidei necessitate …
(5) --- J. Ratzinger, Einfuhrung in das Christentum
(Munich, 1968), p. 53. |
