Faith, Reason, and the Struggle for Mutual Recognition

Against Nostalgia

It is frequently claimed that Christianity achieves a “balance,” “harmony,” or “reconciliation” between faith and reason. While this is not without truth, it is often presented in a form tinged with the nostalgia for pure origins.

Christianity, we are told, enters history in such a way as to resolve the contradictions of the pagan world. The serenity of this reconciliation, we’re told in rapturous tones, pervades the entirety of the medieval world, from the Gothic arch to the structure of Aquinas’ Summa. But this does not do justice to Christ’s statement: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And it leaves unexplained, except through malice or pure error, the dissolution of this alleged medieval harmony and the open conflicts of the modern world.

If Christianity ultimate secures a reconciliation of faith and reason, it does not achieve this result without a conflict that shakes the soul (and society) to its foundations. If there is a reconciliation, it passes by way of secularism and the Enlightenment, even if these are not given the final word. There can be no harmony which is pure, no unmixed nostalgia. There is only the harmony that emerges, as a shift of perspective, at the heart of bitterest contradiction.

The Problem Christianity Creates

One must first realize that there is no problem of “faith” and “reason” before Christianity. There is, certainly, a conflict between the household gods (the Penates) and the laws of the polis (Antigone). There is, certainly, a conflict between the assertion of subjectivity particularity and established Greek society (the crisis of Sophistry). And to a certain degree, embodied by the figure of Socrates, there are attempts to determine how the universality of logos can coexist with the individual conviction (reified in his inspiration of the daimon).

But even with gradual emergence of subjectivity (in the Sophists, the person of Socrates, and tragedy generally), subjective particularity does not have absolute worth in Greek society. Nor do the gods of Greek religion demand “faith,” in the sense this would have for Paul or Augustine. This is not to say that the cultus is merely a matter of outer observance, but that the inner certainty of the individual subject has not reached the level of an absolute principle which could rival that of logos in its universality.

This would have to wait for Christianity, even if it may have been prepared for by the individuality of the Roman world, where citizenship is increasingly an abstract legality. When God takes on flesh, and the Absolute exists in and as the self-consciousness and certainty of an individual human being, the right of subjectivity are raised to absolute status. In the religion which arises through the Spirit, following his death, this principle is known as “faith,” in which the person comes to have a dignity and identity which lies outside all cosmic and ontological Law, and which runs orthogonal to the rule of every power and principality.

Christianity states that the universal Logos is identical with the self-certainty of this particular man struck to the core by his fear of death. And this identity is confirmed by the Spirit poured out on the community, which bears inner witness.

This, more than an alleged perennial problem of reason and revelation (which would be indifferent to the form or content of revelation), is the skandalon eating at the heart of Western culture.

A Pre-Established Harmony: The Medieval World

Christianity claims from the beginning, by naming the Son Logos, that the demands of individual subjectivity (divine and absolute in Christ, inclusive of the individuations of fellow Sons in the Spirit) are not ultimately at odds with rational universality. But this harmony is not demonstrated, but rather presupposed. The development of faith’s content unfolds through the process of conciliar definition, which implicitly unfolds a logic, but in the form of dogma whose binding universality are not apparent to reason.

The medieval world made considerable efforts to demonstrate the reconciliation it presupposed, beginning with Augustine and culminating in Anselm and Richard of St. Victor (Aquinas, here, with his reticence about arguments for the Trinity, arguably already foreshadows the Enlightenment divorce).

But so long as reason operated beneath the umbrella of faith - without its own autonomy and independence - and faith assumed an institutional form which did not fully recognize the individual conscience, the union of the two was superficial. A deeper unity required a temporary divorce. The contradiction must develop, the wound must be exposed in order to be healed (without a scar).

The Dam Breaks: Modernity

This is what happened with the Enlightenment and Reformation. In the Reformation, in the realm of faith, the principle of individual conscience asserts itself against the hierarchy in the person of Luther . In the Enlightenment, in the person of Descartes, reason attempts to ground itself in its individual self-certainty. In both cases, the principle of subjectivity (which has always been implicit in Christianity) asserts its rights with a vengeance.

The result of these twin revolutions are new permutations of faith and reason, and a new relationship between them. The innocence of the medieval pre-established harmony is violently disrupted. An increasingly fideistic form of faith (roughly, pietism) casts aside mediation and the medieval attempts to know or prove God, and an increasingly empty abstract Enlightenment reason leaves behind both the content of Christian doctrine and the substantial inheritance of the tradition more broadly.

The Task: Mutual Recognition

The crucial turn occurs when we realize that these two antagonists (pietist faith and Enlightenment reason), engaged in a struggle to the death, contain their Other in themselves. In its content (the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the notion of revleation), the Christian faith is implicitly rational and universal, even if it has withdrawn into subjective feeling. Similarly, in its very assertion of the infinite rights of subjectivity, Enlightenment reason takes as its principle faith’s inner certainty (which presupposes the Incarnation).

These are, if they cling to their diminished and idolatrous Absolutes, dead ends. What is required, as in every dialectical conflict of Master and Slave, is mutual recognition. The reconciliation requires something of both sides: faith must accept the demands of logos rather than maintain a defensive posture, but reason must open itself to the possibility of receiving concrete content from religion/the traditional past. Traditional faith must be imbued with the form of Enlightenment freedom, but Enlightenment reason must be open to receiving the content of traditional faith (speculatively understood).

But as forgiveness witnesses, this mutual recognition is only possible because it is first withheld: a felix culpa. In that Night of infinite negativity, which reflects the one passed through by the God-man, a unity is glimpsed at the heart of bitterest contradiction. Amidst the collapse of all our hopes, the Lord meets us on the road.

Nostalgia, as the longing for purity, is a barrier to forgiveness. And forgiveness is the original site of all freedom.

Like the initial rejection experienced in confession, secular reason was necessary. Only thus could the harmony of faith and reason which the medieval world presupposed become actual. Only now, having allowed them to go their separate ways, only to find one another again, we can say with John Paul II in Fides et Ratio that the relationship between them truly is a circle.