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Allow me to begin by expressing my most profound thanks to Dr. Dillon and to all who have been responsible for extending the gracious invitation to me to be here with you to celebrate the 35th anniversary of this extraordinarily fine institution. It is no flattery, but a fact, to point out that for many of us Catholics, as well as non-Catholics throughout the United States, Thomas Aquinas College has become the prophet Jeremiah’s proverbial wall of brass, pillar of iron, and fortified city in the present condition of Catholic higher education in the United States. I am sure that many of the students do not fully appreciate, as they will in the near future, the excellence of the education and formation that they are receiving and the wonderful intellectual and spiritual opportunities that Thomas Aquinas College has opened and continues to open up for them. The benefactors and staff members are, obviously, those most responsible for the fine condition of Thomas Aquinas College, and for all the wonderful hopes that its present superb condition imply for a very promising future. A Catholic institution of higher learning, that is, post-secondary school education, must always be the important locus for the interaction, interfacing, and intersection of faith and reason, religion, and science, and on the intellectual level, the natural and the supernatural order. It is appropriate that this institution is named after the great Angelic Doctor of the 13th century whose accomplishments and whose intellectual depth continue to profoundly influence our world today, albeit not as appropriately and adequately as these should. The Relationship of Faith and Reason Just this week, our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI speaking at the University of Regensburg, where he had been at one time a professor, remarked about the relationship of faith and reason in a way that, I believe, deserves quoting: The fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the Faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself. A critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvelous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover…is the will to be obedient to the truth, and as such it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity. The intention, then, is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities, and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as an historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet, the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought—to philosophy and theology. Forphilosophy and, albeit, in a different way for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says, ‘It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being. But in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss.’ The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur—this is the program with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. ‘Not to act reasonably is contrary to the nature of God.’ To Rediscover the Breadth of Reason The Pope concludes by saying, “To this breadth of reason,
we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover
it constantly is the great task of a college or university.” The urgency of the task has been reiterated on another occasion last week by Pope Benedict XVI. He said in a homily at Regensburg that what the Church believes must be proclaimed by the Church clearly in today’s anxious and violent world: It is necessary to recognize the modern pathologies associated with reason and religion and the ways that God’s image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism. In the light of these distortions, Christians need to say clearly that the God in whom we believe and proclaim confidently is a God who has a human face. Only this can free us from being afraid of God, which ultimately is at the root of modern atheism. Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life. While theology is necessary in our world, it is not necessary to understand the Faith. Deep down, it is quite simple: belief in God the Creator, and Christ the Savior, and in everlasting life as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed…. Modern attempts to make God unnecessary have always failed because it became clear that something is missing from the equation! When God is subtracted, something does not add up for man, the world, and the whole vast universe. The world faces two approaches to the ultimate questions about life: What came first, Creative Reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason which, lacking any meaning, somehow brings forth a mathematically-ordered cosmos as well as man and his reason? If a human being is nothing more than a chance result of evolution, humanity becomes meaningless. Christians, on the other hand…believe that at the beginning of everything is the Eternal Word, with Reason and not Unreason. The idea of an ultimate judgment which makes people afraid is actually the prospect of the triumph of justice. We want to see the outrageous injustice and suffering which can be observed in human history to be finally undone, so that in the end everyone will find happiness and everything will be shown to have meaning….So faith is not meant to instill fear, but to call people to accountability. As I listened to the Holy Father’s words, I could not help but apply them to the 35th anniversary of this institution, particularly because the Pope concluded by saying, “We are not meant to waste our lives, misuse them, or spend them selfishly. In the face of injustice we must not remain indifferent and thus end up as silent collaborators or outright accomplices.” In all that the present Holy Father has spoken, particularly most recently in Regensburg, one finds an echo of the incredibly sublime writing of Pope John Paul II in his great encyclical Fides et Ratio, Faith and Reason. The Strong Synthesis of Philosophy and Theology Certainly, one of the great contributions that Thomas Aquinas College has made, and continues to make, is a witness to a strong synthesis of philosophy and theology in its academic undertakings. Not only does the College provide for a strong spiritual formation for students and staff, but it also makes it possible for these intellectual connections between faith and reason, between philosophy and theology, to be part of the warp and woof of the achievement in academics of the graduates of this fine institution. In a certain sense, and not stretching the analogy too far, Thomas Aquinas College stands as an icon, in my view, of the encyclical Fides et Ratio of Pope John Paul II. Our present Holy Father, Pope Benedict, commenting on that encyclical, might in the same commentary also be making reference by implication to this institution. He says, for instance, Just as philosophy must listen to empirical knowledge that matures in the different sciences, so it should also consider the sacred tradition of the religions and, above all, the message of Sacred Scripture as a source of knowledge by which to be made fertile. There is no great philosophy that has not received clarifications and indications from the religious tradition, whether we think of the philosophies of Greece, or India, or of the philosophy that has developed within Christianity, or yet again, of modern philosophies, convinced of the autonomy of reason and which consider such autonomy as the ultimate measure of thought, but all the same, remain in debt to the great themes of thought that the Biblical faith has contributed to philosophy all along the way. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling would not be thinkable without the premises of faith, and Karl Marx himself, albeit in his radical confutation, lives on the horizons of hope inherited from the Hebrew tradition. Wherever philosophy eliminates totally this dialogue with the thought of faith, it ends up, as formulated, once by Jaspers, in a seriousness that goes on emptying itself. In the end, it finds itself forced to abandon the problem of truth, that is to say, it abandons itself because a philosophy that no longer asks itself who we are, why do we exist, whether God and eternal life exist, is a philosophy in abdication. The Holy Father goes on once again in almost an implied tribute to the work of Thomas Aquinas College by saying that in the culture, the dethronement of theology and metaphysics has made thought much more narrow, and it makes human beings become stupid through irreligiosity. “In leaving aside the ultimate questions, reason has made itself indifferent and boring. It has become irrelevant for the existential dilemmas of good and evil, of death and immortality.” Giving Courage to Many The Pope in Fides et Ratio, and also by implication, Thomas Aquinas College, has given courage to many men and entire peoples. What the witness of this College is has perhaps sounded hard and cutting to the ears of many, and even aroused hatred, but when it ceases there will be an instant of fearful silence. For when God and man, sin and grace, death and eternal life are no longer spoken of, then all the cries and all the noise there will be, will be only a vain attempt at self-deception before the silencing of what is truly human. We must always oppose the danger of this silence with what Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI called “parrhesia,” with the fearless frankness of faith, thus providing a service not only to the Catholic Church but to the whole of humanity. Allow me in closing to assert what I feel is a mission, indeed a mission from God, a call from God, and a sending forth from God given to this institution. Once again in Jeremiah’s terms, it is to stand as a pillar of iron, a wall of brass, and a fortified city against the pervasive materialism that marks Western culture; against the decline of culture that had been nourished for hundreds of years by the Christian faith-—a culture that rejects comprehensive, coherent, and structured values; a crumbling culture; a universe breaking into pieces; a culture in question; and a culture that has in pluralism and relativism its fundamental goals. To ask with George Bernanos: When freedom is extolled, freedom to what end?’ Freedom which is not truly free leads, as Pope John Paul II has repeatedly said, to totalitarianism. Indeed, unless truth trumps freedom in one’s mind and imagination and psychology, there is no true freedom but only a pathway to despotism. Cardinal Suhard once defined modern civilization, that is, a society without God, as a godless desert, a void in which society dies. To oppose this with the vigorous life of the intellect, with a deep and profound conviction of the truth of the Catholic faith, and with an ardent devotion to the Roman pontificate which is, of course, the heir to the universal culture and values of humanity, Thomas Aquinas College, in my view, has the grand mission that will assist in leading all to their eternal salvation, as well as at the same time to save the civilization of this planet. The first 35 years of Thomas Aquinas College are now completed. It is a time to look back and salute the past, but at the same time to gaze with trust and confidence in God with the prayers of the Angelic Doctor into the future, and to imagine that the next 35 years, perhaps the next 350 years will be a time of greater accomplishments in which the calling and mission of this school will rain down even greater blessings upon humanity. -- 35th Anniversary 2007 |
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