Had St. Thomas Aquinas’s view of philosophy and theology not prevailed, "medieval Europe would have become like the Iran of the Ayatollah." Such was the assessment of the late Professor Ralph McInerny, one of the century’s greatest philosophers, in a lecture sponsored by Holy Apostles Bioethics Center in 1991. Dr. McInerny added that Aquinas’s thinking also ensured that lectures such as his could always take place down through the centuries in other academic institutions "with significant links to the medieval university."
It was Aquinas, of course, who meticulously worked out the relationship between faith and reason. As Pope Benedict XVI explained during a recent general audience (16 June), St. Thomas demonstrated both the independence of philosophy and theology while simultaneously proving "their reciprocal relationality."
Contemporary man has been conditioned to presume that faith and reason are incompatible. This unsophisticated attitude, dating from the 19th century, is becoming more aggressive and hostile toward believers almost daily, as skewed news stories and academic theories proliferate. Faith, the Holy Father insisted, "consolidates, integrates and illumines the heritage of truth that human reason acquires." Faith and reason as instruments of truth can "be traced back to the conviction that both stem from the one source of all truth, the divine Logos, which is active in both contexts, that of Creation and that of redemption."
That faith and reason cannot possibly be in contradiction does not mean, however, that they always use the same cognitive methods. As the Holy Father explains, reason "receives a truth by virtue of its intrinsic evidence, mediated or unmediated," whereas faith "accepts a truth on the basis of the authority of the Word of God that is revealed."
Thus, Aquinas, in his monumental Summa Theologiae, admits that there are two kinds of sciences. Some proceed "from a principle known by the natural light of the intelligence, such as arithmetic and geometry," while others rest upon "principles known by the light of a higher science…" In much the same way "sacred doctrine is a science, because it proceeds from principles established by the light of a higher science, namely the science of God and the blessed."
The relationship between reason and faith is dramatically emphasized by the very definition of theology; namely, Fides quaerens intellectum ("faith in quest of understanding"), a phrase historically associated with St. Anselm. Pope Benedict restates it for the contemporary world: [theology is] "basically the exercise of this task of the mind [i.e., the quest for truth] which shows the intelligibility of faith, its articulation and inner harmony, its reasonableness and its ability to further human good."
This quest is not easy, precisely because of the distance between God, who is the infinite Source of all being, and the human being, who is a creature, albeit the summit of God’s creation in the world. The problem is, of course, that the human being has no other way of engaging in language about God than in inadequate human terms. The only way out of this dilemma, Aquinas held, is by analogy.
Analogy refers to the process by which the human being, a creature, attempts to engage in God-talk. Although there is only one world of thought, the truths of faith transcend the general laws of the natural world that are known from the worldly sciences. In other words, theological data cannot be grasped simply by the rules of the human sciences. Yet theology can begin to comprehend, explain and defend the truths of faith by somehow utilizing the data of the natural sciences. Cardinal Yves Congar, the great theologian whose inspiration became a major force during Vatican Council II, once used the metaphor of Christ the King to explain the concept of analogy. The reality is beyond our capacity to grasp, since it is a deep mystery. However, we can begin to talk about it by borrowing the human concept of a king and then "transferring" this concept, as it were, to our understanding of Christ’s Kingship, as revealed in Sacred Scripture.
"Vineyard" or "vine," as found in the Bible is another example. Here Msgr. Ronald Knox helps us out immeasurably when he proposed that Jesus did not refer to himself as the "true vine" (Jn 15) merely because he chanced to see a vine outside the Upper Room he was departing for Gethsemane, and thought it might help his Apostles more readily grasp the meaning of unity with him. Rather, Msgr. Knox wrote, it was the other way around. Vines only exist because in the beginning God desired to invite human beings, whom he would create, into unity with him. The reality, then, is not the vine, but rather unity with the Father in Jesus. Vines only exist because God, in the beginning, wanted us all to be one in him.
