The Successor of Ignatius and the Successor of Peter
From the greeting of the new Father General of the Jesuits to Pope Benedict at today’s audience:
What inspires and impels us is the Gospel and the Spirit of Christ: if the Lord Jesus was not at the centre of our life we would have no sense of our apostolic activity, we would have no reason for our existence. It is from the Lord Jesus we learn to be near to the poor and suffering, to those who are excluded in this world.
The spirituality of the Society of Jesus has as its source the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. And it is in the light of the Spiritual Exercises – which in their turn inspired the Constitutions of the Society – that the General Congregation is in these days tackling the subjects of our identity and of our mission. The Spiritual Exercises, before becoming a precious tool for the apostolate, are for the Jesuit the touchstone by which to judge our own spiritual maturity.
In communion with the Church and guided by the Magisterium, we seek to dedicate ourselves to profound service, to discernment, to research. The generosity with which so many Jesuits work for the Kingdom of God, even to giving their very lives for the Church, does not mitigate the sense of responsibility that the Society feels it has in the Church. Responsibility that Your Holiness confirms in Your Letter, when You affirm: “The evangelizing work of the Church therefore relies a lot on the formative responsibility that the Society has in the fields of theology, spirituality and mission”.
Alongside the sense of responsibility, must go humility, recognizing that the mystery of God and of man is much greater than our capacity for understanding.
It saddens us, Holy Father, when the inevitable deficiencies and superficialities of some among us are at times used to dramatize and represent as conflicts and clashes what are often only manifestations of limits and human imperfections, or inevitable tensions of everyday life. But all this does not discourage us, nor quell our passion, not only to serve the Church, but also, with a deeper sense of our roots, according to the spirit of the Ignatian tradition, to love the hierarchical Church and the Holy Father, the Vicar of Christ.
“En todo amar y servir”. This represents a portrait of who Ignatius is. This is the identity card of a true Jesuit.
The full text is available on the official Jesuit web site, as is the Pope’s discourse, not yet translated from the Italian.
However, Vatican Radio provides some indications of the Pope’s message:
Today, noted the Pope, “the obstacles challenging those who announce the Gospel are no longer seas and vast distances, rather they are the boundaries of a superficial vision of God and of man, which place obstacles in the way of faith and human knowledge, faith and science, faith and the commitment to justice”. Faced with these boundaries, continued Pope Benedict, Jesuits must “witness and help create the understanding that there is instead true harmony between faith and reason”, a harmony that must be translated into the defence of those “central issues which today are increasingly under attack from secular culture”. In short marriage and the family, sexual morality and the question of mankind’s salvation in Christ:
Here the Pope invited the Jesuits to renewed reflection on the meaning of their characteristic “fourth vow” of obedience to the St Peter’s Successor, which he said “does not only imply readiness to be sent on mission to far off lands, but also in true Ignatian spirit – to feel themselves “with the Church and in the Church” – to love and serve the Christ’s Vicar as precious and irreplaceable collaborators at the service of the Universal Church”.
Once again, Pope Benedict speaks easily about the “true harmony between faith and reason.” I have to confess that I do not know how to define reason. Faith is a gift, a theological virtue, a response to Divine Revelation. Of course, I recognize that we do something called reasoning. We sometimes do it well, but not always. We have reasons for what we do, again, some good and some bad. And what is the connection between the rational an the reasonable? Of course, there is some connection, but just what is it? Just what is this reason that is in “true harmony” with faith?
JPII goes on at length in Fides et Ratio about the connection between faith and reason. He saw philosophy as the highest embodiment of reasoning, which he considered one method for discerning truth:
“Men and women have at their disposal an array of resources for generating greater knowledge of truth so that their lives may be ever more human. Among these is philosophy, which is directly concerned with asking the question of life’s meaning and sketching an answer to it. Philosophy emerges, then, as one of noblest of human tasks.” (para. 3)
However, though there is a “fundamental harmony between the knowledge of faith and the knowledge of philosophy,” reason must finally give way to faith:
“Faith asks that its object [divine revelation] be understood with the help of reason; and at the summit of its searching reason acknowledges that it cannot do without what faith presents.” (para. 42)
I guess it’s not surprising that JPII would have such an interest in philosophy. I believe he had a doctorate in the subject. To my mind, Fides et Ratio reflects both JPII’s very deep love for philosophy and his belief that philosophy/reasoning can take us closer to understanding divine revelation, but that it is only faith that can grasp and hold on to it.
I appreciate what Mr. Collier says. Nonetheless, I still worry about remarks like “reason must finally give way to faith” and “at the summit of its searching reason acknowledges that it cannot do without what faith presents.” My worry is that remarks like this apparently say that unless a thinker comes to recognize the need to make the leap to faith, he or she has made some error in his or her thinking. That may indeed be the case, but it is not obviously so. Philosophical errors can only be corrected philosophically by further thinking.
To put the matter more straightforwardly, consider our belief in the divinity of the man Jesus. I can’t imagine a path of philosophical thinking that would lead one “to acknowledge that it cannot do without what faith presents” and so it should, in philosophical consistency, conclude that the man Jesus is indeed God.
I completely agree that philosophy cannot prove false any part of Christian revelation. But I have no reason to think that the practice of philosophizing, by its own intrinsic character, necessarily brings every good practitioner to conclude that he or she “must finally give way to faith.”
For those of us blessed with the grace of faith, that is exactly what we do. But for those without this grace, it makes no sense to say that they have somehow failed to follow their thinking to its proper conclusion.
In ethics, the notion of reason GIVING WAY to faith is also troublesome. How do you persuade people who aren’t Christians to adopt particular policies if not on the basis of reason–or more broadly, reasonableness? (There is, in the legal system, a broad concept of the ‘reasonable person” that does a lot of normative work.)
Dear Bernard,
I appreciate the seriousness of your concerns. I do not think that the “must” in John Paul’s Encyclical (which, if memory serves, received the editorial approbation of the “philosophes” at the NYT) is a must of compulsion but of congruence.
I believe it was Blondel who compared the philosophical endeavor to the Dome of the Pantheon which soars, open to the sky, yet incomplete, and in that sense gives way to faith, not as external compulsion, but as inner completion.
The dangers of faith without reason:
“I know what you mean about being repulsed by the church when you have only the Mechanical-Jansenist Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.” Flannery O’Connor
“Faith is not the license for facile interpretation, and religious zeal is no substitute for hard work.” Stanley B. Marrow, The Words of Jesus in Our Gospels, Paulist Press, 1979.
And there is this little retort:
“The mainstay of the Catholic Church appears to be the faithful who refrain from questioning, either because it is of no interest to them or because they have surrounded themselves beforehand with an impregnable barrier. Anyone who wants to think about religion in a really serious way must inevitably come up with heretical ideas.” Czeslaw Milosz, A Year of The Hunter (1994).
Thanks for your comments, Fr. Imbelli. Nonetheless, I think that whatever “congruence” and “inner completion” faith brings is always extra-philosophical. That is, only through the gift of faith, does the thinker find the congruence or completion. He or she does not find it philosophically.
In actual life, philosophers Jack and Jill know how to work philosophically and know that philosophy cannot reasonably claim to have the last word about all matters. They also know that there are Christians who have faith, some of whom are philosophers. Furthermore, they know or can know what these Christians believe. These Christians recognize that their faith and its doctrinal content does not depend on their own or anyone else’s philosophizing. Jack and Jill then are faced with a decision. Will they follow their Christian colleagues and make the leap, non-philosophically, to faith? They cannot do so without God’s grace to do so. Whether they receive that grace we just don’t know.
I don’t mean to be dogmatic. I’m just trying to be both clear and succinct.
Without any apparent good REASON, Abraham packed up at the word of God and was justified by faith.
Paul says that Christ’s cross doesn’t make sense to philosophers.
“If Christ is not risen, our faith is in vain.”
So obviously there is risk – perhaps great risk – involved in faith.
The anxiety/fear over secularism could overplay the faith – reason connection. I think, on balance, the Society of Jesus has done an excellent job of showing connectedness in this area.
Now that Fr. Martin has rubbed his hands in the holy dirt of the Sanrtuario here, maybe he could scribble a few line on how the Society will move forward in obedience to the message from rome.
If one’s faith is blind, then is delivers neither sight nor insight.