Editoriale – 35

Il 25 giugno sono intervenuto al Simposio Internazionale dei Docenti Universitari con una relazione dal titolo "Verità e rivelazione fra filosofia e teologia". Di seguito una sintesi in inglese del mio contributo

VIII INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

Truth and Revelation between theology and philosophy

To introduce ourselves to the difficult and complex topic I have to discuss, I would like to start by quoting the incipit of the encyclical Fides et ratio: «Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth-in a word, to know himself-so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33: 18; Ps 27: 8-9; 63: 2-3; Jn 14: 8; 1 Jn 3: 2».

The use of the two wings metaphor spurs immediately two things: the centrality of the truth as goal, and the meaning of faith and reason; more appropriately, these have the status of the means towards an end, which is much more important and qualifies the iden-tity and value of the means (as the means is, by its nature, directed towards a goal, without which it would lose meaning) and this goal is represented by the truth. The goal, what moves the human spirit, is the desire to know the truth or, better, to contemplate the truth. Indeed, the knowledge the encyclical speaks about does not have an abstract or formal character but, as it relates to human life, is the element qualifying its ontological identity. This means that the constitutive status of man, the distinctive mark of his nature as a crea-ture, is the tension, this necessary tending towards the truth, that is, ultimately, to God, in whose knowledge man finds the truth about himself and understands who he is. The truth is the goal in view and at the service of which faith and reason are placed.

The wings metaphor also suggests that faith and reason are both necessary: as a bird could not fly if left with one wing, without reason or faith man forecloses not only his ac-cess to truth but the possibility itself to know the truth. Because both are necessary, faith and reason are also called on to cooperate. If on the one hand, then, some cooperation is necessary, on the other it is clear that faith and reason remain two distinct realities irre-ducible to each other: faith is something other than rationality, the same way that reason constitutes itself as a reality other than belief. This emphasis may seem foregone, even ob-vious; however, it is good to recall that it is not obvious at all, especially considering the repeated attempts, in history, to include in or reduce faith to reason (rationalism) or reason to faith (fideism).

Specifically, reason defines Man as a truth seeker (a reason that grasps and knows truth because truth is logos – that is, it is reason in the sense that it is known and recog-nized through reason) and faith as the acceptance of this same truth in continuity with rea-son that does not stop at truth but, knowing it, perceives its inexhaustibility and entrusts it-self to truth, which makes up for the limits of reason, its inadequacy, by showing itself, by revealing itself.

It is interesting to note that the reference to contemplation, hence the stress on a contemplative view of truth, allows, first of all, overcoming and defeating the temptation to reduce reason to instrumental rationality or, as Heidegger would put it, to "calculating thought," which links the value of things to their usability with an attitude of predominance and abuse. After all, if reason remains a means (instrument) to an end it – like any means – acquires value and meaning only in relation to the end; the moment that the end is denied (because considered non-existent or unattainable) the means unavoidably loses meaning and, therefore, no longer has the value that derives from the end. A reason without truth is useless; it is no longer necessary for life and, at that point, human beings can resort to other criteria, to other means with which to live, having lost the motivation of the end, of truth.

Truth, according to the Greek meaning, a-letheia, is what manifests itself by com-ing out of its original concealment; therefore reason, while seeking truth, can only prepare to recognize and embrace truth's giving itself-telling itself. Knowing is always recogniz-ing, embracing something that lets itself be known, that reveals itself; the re-velatio, in turn, is always, at once, truth's coming into the open while hiding again in order to main-tain the irreducible ulteriority of truth and to avoid becoming captive of calculating thought which, indeed, tends to reduce being to the entity, missing out on the ontologi-cal difference both between entities and being, and between the ontic determinations of truth and the inexhaustible mystery of truth itself, which is always ulterior, as id quo nihil majus cogitar potest, as the horizon of thought to which the latter naturally tends but that is always "beyond," so that truth's self-giving in history always maintains, so to speak, an "eschatological reservation."

This justifies why we have to put Revelation at the forefront as the self-communicating event of God-truth and as the principle guiding not only the knowledge of faith (theology) but also the knowledge of reason (philosophy). To men eager to know the truth, the latter reveals itself with the most absolute gratuity, because «in His goodness and wisdom God chose to reveal Himself and to make known to us the hidden purpose of His will» (Dei Verbum 2). Furthermore, because revelation derives from the freedom of love, truth demands to be embraced in freedom as an expression of love. (Fides et ratio 15) At the same time this revelation produces thought, by opening the horizon of reason while also respecting its autonomy and freedom.

The horizon of revelation, then, and its capacity to stimulate thought, allows integrating and understanding the idea of truth as adaequatio, since only if we recognize reason's capacity to grasp the thing in itself, and not only its manifestation (the grounding beyond and next to the phenomenon), then truth's opening to let itself be known becomes the decisive event for human beings and their reason. The horizon of truth, as the common horizon to which reason and faith tend in their distinction without separation, allows preserving the reciprocal other-ness of the two. Throughout history, and from within faith and reason, we have witnessed repeated attempts to turn this difference into identity, or other-ness into separation. The frequent fideistic and rationalistic temptations follow the idea of making either faith or reason superfluous. In the case of fideism, faith supplants reason and makes it useless: as reason is uncertain on truth, faith – instead of curing reason's handicap – ends up replacing it, so that reason is either useless or wholly subordinate to faith. In the rationalistic temptation, conversely, the elimination of difference takes place at the level of, or better, starting from, reason that, like Prometheus (or like Titan), vindicates the rule and exclusive competence on truth, tol-erating no other standard for truth but itself, and reducing the contents of faith to truths of reason that are partial or imperfectly formulated, in any case to be pursued and brought into the realm of reason.

Truth, sought by reason and accepted again by reason inside faith, gives a new meaning to reason and faith which are now implied together: faith fulfills reason without never repudiate it; indeed if gratia perficit, what is fulfilled cannot be abandoned. Reason, in his searching for truth, realizes that the most corrected position toward truth is its being acknowledged, is to receive it while it shows itself. This is the idea we find in Plato's famous work Phaedo on the opportunity of a revelation as the fulfillment of reason's search, which would otherwise remain incomplete, unable to give an exhaustive form that satisfies the boundlessness of human enquiry. Speaking to Socrates and considering the different ways in which men can relate to the knowledge of those things that are the most important and decisive in life, Simmias identified three most reasonable modalities: trusting in the testimony of those who know more; relying on the position that seems less prone to attack at the level of argumentation; or, and this would be the most desirable solution, as it is the safest and less hazardous, trusting in a divine revelation.

Another example could be represented by Blondel and his phenomenology of ac-tion, at the end of which we have the idea of supernatural (we could say revelation using different words with the same meaning) as, almost oxymoronically, "what is absolutely impossible and absolutely necessary for man". This "necessity of the supernatural" «re-sounds as the humble confession of philosophical reason: a humble and, at the same time, ineffective confession in terms of providing the gift whose expectation was highlighted in the irrepressible dynamism of action. Attesting the absolute necessary nature of the super-natural coherently entails stating the impossibility to philosophically deny its possible re-alization in the free gift of revelation and in the actual practice of life. The necessarily heteronymous fulfillment of man's yearning maintains an inexhaustible excess compared to reason: precisely due to its inescapable otherness, it remains unattainable for any ra-tional "invention," in both its form and content».

I find it meaningful that, in a quite different philosophical context – phenomenol-ogy – the conclusions reached by J.L. Marion are very similar in terms of the relationship between theology and philosophy, faith and reason, as inevitable but not deducible a-priori. The French phenomenologist explains that phenomenology is tasked with identifying the possibility of gift in the form of the saturated phenomenon, but it can say nothing about it being actually given. The intuitive fulfillment that goes from the possibility of the phe-nomenon to its reality requires the actual experience of the gift. The boundary between phenomenology and theology is represented by the distinction between revelation as a pos-sibility and revelation as a historical fact; the former cannot give a face to the gift and «when the donated entity turns to charity (the loved or loving entity, loving in the strictest and most rigorous sense of the word), phenomenology gives way to revealed theology, the same way that, in Pascal, the second order gives way to the third».

So, reason seeks truth, it seeks meaning; faced with reality, provoked by events and life, with its tragic as well as celebratory nature, reason interrogates itself, it cannot but ask questions. It also perceives that its search is not just inserted in an endless dynamism; it always reaches provisional results, which demand something else. In other words, reason recognizes mystery as the ultimate horizon towards which it tends but that it cannot ex-haust; furthermore, it perceives the timeliness of a revelation of the mystery that goes to-wards men, as Socrates already underlined in Plato's Phaedo, a text we mentioned above. It is impossible to think reason without focusing on the theme of truth, without recognizing the intentionality of truth as the constitutive character of reason and faith (cf Fides et ratio 33).

The continuity between faith and reason emerges from all this; faith, in some ways, in the search and acknowledge of truth, embodies the fulfillment, rather than the sacrifice, of reason. If reason acknowledges that there is something beyond itself, that truth should not only be sought but can also be embraced, it can entrust itself to revelation in faith. But if reason admits nothing above itself, there will never be room for faith or, better, there will never be agreement or continuity between faith and reason. The perspective of the aut fides aut ratio appears inevitable when reason acknowledges nothing, no mystery. At the same time, as long as knowledge is only a matter of instrumental reason, there will be no room for faith as a form of mediated knowledge – based on testimony – and faith will be reduced to an extra-rational and purely subjective fact, devoid of any objective and cognitive value.

There is no longer any room for faith, or better, for a harmonious and circular rela-tionship between faith and reason if:

1) reason gives up on truth and on the quest for it. If truth is beyond reason, if rea-son is not defined by truth but is instrumental reason or one with other meanings (as it happens today), it cannot enter into a relationship with faith and its content, the Revelation in Christ, who claims to be the truth and meaning. In this case, the danger comes from a reason separated from being's truth and revelation;

2) reason proclaims itself as the only and ultimate guide to truth, so that it will never be able to acknowledge a mystery beyond itself to be affirmed such that there would be nothing irrational in its manifestation. This situation closely recalls that "excess of rea-son" that characterized modernity and that, today, we find in the different forms of scien-tism and of the so-called neo-enlightenment, which re-propose the modern monism of rea-son: any approach to reality is excluded unless it is that of rational knowledge based on an "absolute" reason, the only norm and source of truth, which confuses the acknowledgment of truth with its "production-constitution."

The idea of reason as the ultimate and final tribunal of truth underpins the double perspective in which religion is inserted during modernity, particularly as relates to the possibility of a notion of revelation as a reality definable as an «authority that transcends experience and that manifests itself by giving itself to being experienced» (Marion)Thus, either religion has remained faithful to the principle of revelation, forcing itself to be ex-cluded from metaphysical rationality and doomed to be something irrational, if not even fanatical; or it has submitted to the demands of the principle of reason, thus limiting itself to a religion within the boundaries of reason alone, which is what happened in the two po-sitions that modern metaphysicians have taken on towards revealed religion. On the one hand, we have the perspective of Kant and Fichte (cf. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation), whereby revelation is assessed by the superior authority of the moral law; on the other hand is Hegel, for whom revelation is no longer in conflict with reason but becomes the clear proof of the spirit towards itself, therefore the content of revelation is nothing different from the subject and his/her self-awareness of what is learnt in the superior form of the concept. The leading back/reduction of revelation to reason, as the ultimate standard of its truth and as the constitutive measure of its identity-plausibility, prevents, in any case, revelation from being what it calls itself, that is, the advent of Someone departing from the demands of the principle of reason.

In today's post-modern context, the first interpretation seems to prevail (reason giv-ing up on truth).

We know today how widespread is a crisis of reason which as powerful on scien-tific-empirical level, as week and useless on the non-empirical level. It is the mutilation of reason, whereby «men can no longer enquire rationally on the essential realities of their lives, their origin and goal, their moral duty and what is permitted to them, life and death, but must leave these decisive problems to a sentiment separate from reason, does not ele-vate it but rather deprives it of its dignity» (Ratzinger). What we have here, then, is a kind of double reduction of reason. On the one hand reason becomes confined to the sensible realm and abandons all those domains that cannot be described quantitatively or cannot be included in the empirical sciences; on the other hand it loses meaning in relation to the de-cisive questions of life. It is a fact that, in the concreteness of existence, men cannot trust the indications of technical-instrumental reason, which has nothing to say on the meaning of things, the meaning of action, the good to be done, on feelings, etc; as a consequence, those realms of experience, which are decisive in real and daily existence, are ruled and de-fined by criteria and norms that exceed reason and, as such, can be assimilated to irration-ality and sentiment, so that the norm that men follow in their lives, instead of being reason, becomes what is different from reason. A double reduction of reason is thus performed: on the one hand we have a reason with no truth (because meaning is foreclosed to reason, which only "works" at the level of empirical experience and objects); on the other, we have a truth without reason, because what men consider true, based on which they make deci-sions and choices, act in one way rather than another, no longer derives from considera-tions of a rational character, as reason no longer has any rule over what does not belong to the empirical realm. A reason thus reduced can no longer be the guide for men in their concrete life, one to which all other dimensions of human beings should be subordinated.

Therefore, we have to give back truth to reason in the "crisis of meaning", which is one of the most meaningful aspects of the present condition. This crisis should not be un-derstood only as the difficulty in finding meaning but also, and perhaps more radically, as a questioning of the meaningfulness itself of the question on meaning. The moment that reason forces itself to abandon the search for meaning, it easily reduces itself to functions that are only instrumental. The negation of meaning, not referred to the possibility of reaching it but to the importance of its being taken as a fundamental question, represents a problematic (perhaps the most problematic) aspect of the very nature of Christianity in the post-modern age. As Christian faith "claims to be" the advent of a universal and final meaning, denying that the question of meaning is the decisive, ultimate question of life, makes human beings wholly indifferent to the Christian event.

The foretold end of philosophy as the relinquishment of the thought of the gap be-tween the ontic evidence of reality and the reasons of its existence nullifies Christianity as the offer of the only and true meaning because able to give a definitive answer to a ques-tion that, now, is no longer asked. If there is something absolute in life, it is precisely meaning; meaning – wrote Ratzinger in Introduction to Christianity – is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists. Without the word, with-out meaning, without love he falls into the situation of no-longer-being-able-to-live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance». And, at the same time, faith essentially un-derstands itself in relation to meaning's occurring and manifesting itself; faith, indeed, is «a way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable by knowledge; it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man's calculations and actions area based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up».

"Giving meaning" to life becomes the existential question and it defines the onto-logical structure that is permanently present in the very act of existing. To deny that reason is ontologically defined by the search of meaning, is to deny that reason tends to truth, that is to being as content of his knowledge. Ultimately, today, affirming the dignity of reason entails restating its constitutive link with truth, its being a means at the service of truth, of its search and contemplation. This search, which springs from wonder, is articulated as the attempt to give an answer to the questions on meaning (of life, history and the world) that all human beings carry in themselves. Truth is so intrinsic to human beings that they can correctly be defined as "those who seek truth" (cf FeR 28, 33) and whose search, so deeply rooted in human nature, cannot be wholly useless and vain (cf FeR 29). Being in search for the truth also entails recognizing that human beings have the ability to reach the truth.

In conclusion, faith and reason can meet themselves again starting by truth as their common horizon. The plausibility of the discourse on faith at the level of reason, recover-ing the cognitive value of faith as a speculative provocation that derives from revelation requests an idea of reason as "opening". Christianity remains a speculative incentive, a perennial question that pushes thought towards (truthful) horizons that, on the one hand, would be otherwise unattainable but, on the other, are not foreign to men, nor are they im-possible to be translated in terms of reason, provided we posit an idea of reason as opening to revelation, that is, to the manifestation of truth, as availability to being solicited by the otherness of the speaking of God who, by revealing, reveals Himself. This availability re-quires, on the part of reason, a profession-admission of humbleness: it is not reason that produces truth, but truth that, while occurring, allows reason to be defined as the capacity to recognize it, whatever its source, drawn as it is to the same truth for which men are made and that reason constitutively recognizes. The de-centering of reason is simply the humble acknowledgement of its "welcoming" rather than "seizing" nature, receptive more than normative, "recognizing" more than "claiming," reflective more than calculating.

As (instrumental) scientific rationality itself teaches us, reason never creates, but always discovers something that is manifested in phenomena in terms of laws that can be expressed through mathematical formulas, which are true (that is, they work at the opera-tional level) to the extent that they correspond to reality's manifestation in its true identity in the mark of phenomena that do not conceal, but rather reveal, manifest.

This recalls the characteristic whereby truth manifests itself as an event since it oc-curs (e-venio), it offers itself through the mediation of the sign that calls freedom to a cer-tain recognition, thus revealing the never abstract but always concrete (that is, existential) character of truth, grasped by reason but understood only in the act of embracing, through which we receive something by virtue of the fact that it has already offered itself in a me-diated and never immediate way. This mediation occurs in history, since the site of being and happening, as the gratuity of its giving itself (grace) and freedom as acknowledgement and embracing assent, in concrete terms, is history.

The radical decentralization of reason is manifested through the form with which truth responds and corresponds to reason's questions, where the more reason asks and the more it affirms the constitutive intelligibility of truth. This decentralization does not attrib-ute to reason the humiliation of finiteness, but the humbleness that always goes with those who receive; if any gift comes without merits or conditions, those who receive it, on the one hand, perceive it as a present that meets their expectations but, at the same time, the gift allows the receiver to become aware of a question, of a need that also reveals the nec-essary want of the receiver. Reason's humbleness, the only thing demanded for the gift to be welcomed, is reason's recognizing it is in need, that is, that it is not the ultimate author-ity of truth and being, hence accepting that it is also subordinated to a higher authority. It is something, in sum, somewhat similar to the Pascalian statement according to which reason attains its apex by acknowledging that infinite things surpass it and that, as a consequence, it cannot claim to be the standard of truth and being; thus goes a famous passage: «The last step of reason consists in recognizing that there are endless things that surpass it: it is quite a weak thing, if it does not acknowledge this. Because if natural things surpass it, what should we say of supernatural ones?» (Pensées, 466).

A reason that is humble, thus loyal to its own identity, will perceive the event of revelation not as foreign but as inscribed in that revelatory dynamic of being that is struc-turally entailed by questions and enquiry as the constitutive ontological mark of reason's identity; at the same time, the acceptance of the gift will be in line of principle nothing dif-ferent or alternative to reason's being, because the gift, even in its irreducible other-ness and discontinuity, will always correspond to what reason is (whether reason is aware of it or not).

In the cognitive process, this original openness of reason towards truth, as the meaning of reality, is expressed in wonder as, using Heidegger's words, the "fundamental emotional tone," Standpunkt and permanent nourisher of cognitive dynamism. It is wonder before the gratuity of being, which acknowledges reality as a given, where the desire to know the truth is not manifested as the objectifying capture of being in its determinants (beings), but rather as the understanding of reality and of its permanent original offer com-ing from an other, which manifests itself in the mark of reality and offers itself to knowl-edge according to the dynamic of the gift; to this dynamic corresponds the cognitive event, as the moment where being and the goodness of its manifestation, which embodies an ap-peal without which we would not feel the desire to know the truth, are recognized. Naturally, all this holds if we affirm the intelligibility of reality, that is, if we state that there is a meaning of things that is not only "absence of meaning;" then we should add the recogni-tion that such intelligibility belongs to all the domains of reality, despite the different modes and forms of reason with which this intelligibility is perceived, different modalities that are imposed by the object, which make unsustainable and irrational the reductionism of reason to one only form or dimension.

Here is, then, the task of giving life, and its need for meaning, back to reason and, consequently, the necessary restitution to reason of that original status as the site of the en-quiry on and search for the truth (whatever the domain of truth that is investigated), denied which faith loses meaning and plausibility. After all, the appeal of the sacred author to ex-plain, to make an apology of faith (cf. 1 Pt. 3: 15ff) refers to the articulation of that mean-ing-laden reason for which we believe, once it is ascertained that we are dealing with the logos of hope and that, therefore, the justification, demanded in a context essentially char-acterized by the dramatic experience of persecution, resorts to reason as the only forum be-fore which faith can be legitimized; at the same time, this tells us that the moment reason gives up its calling and stops stating the logos that structures reality, at that point faith also loses its identity and, therefore, its nature.

I would insist on the idea of Revelation as a great provocation for thought, a kind of permanent provocation if not its "true guiding star." A reason that is defined as the search for truth and for the meaning of things cannot avoid engaging with an event that bears meaning and that defines itself as revelation of truth. We are faced here with the "philoso-phical range of revelation" so that today, once barriers and separations are overcome, reve-lation has reverted to being at the center of a rich philosophical reflection.

In principle it could not be otherwise because, if we embrace the idea that revela-tion under the structural dimension is «the historical manifestation of an overall meaning of existence, in the face of which reason, guided by the interest in a right form of life, ac-knowledges "here you must be engaged wholly and with no reservations!"», reason cannot avoid engaging with this reality, it cannot avoid verifying the claim of truth of revelation, its sustainability that, ultimately, is a fact of reason, in the sense that revelation introduces a truth that respects the autonomy of the creature (hence of reason) but it provokes, it pushes towards mystery, towards the broadening of the horizons of reason itself. After all, doesn't the statement, from Aquinas onwards, that revelation introduces truths that reason alone could not reach, also mean that, in so doing, it broadens the field and object of rea-son? In this sense, then, revelation "produces thought" (cf FeR, 15), it spurs thought.

In today's context, where the need for the dialogue between different cultures and religions within a pluralistic articulation of truth is felt, there is a pressing need to rebuild the alliance between faith and reason, recognizing that reason is the necessary form where God's truth is affirmed in men, and to rediscover in the logos, to which both God and hu-mans are normatively linked, the "objective" instrument to debate beyond what has been defined the "confused rhetoric of post-modernism."