The relationship between faith and reason has long been a load-bearing column of Catholic intellectual life. The idea that these two dimensions of the human spirit should converse, sustain one another, and avoid their respective temptations—fanaticism on one side, nihilism on the other—has guided theological thought for centuries. In 1998, Pope John Paul II gave the principle one of its most polished articulations in his encyclical Fides et ratio: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
But this balance carries a familiar risk: that it will harden into a fixed schema, a grid, a theory that, in its attempt to hold everything together, ends up excluding life in its flesh and contradictions. John Paul himself cracked open the frame with his poetry.
Read Full Article »