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5 On Knowing God through Loving Him Beyond “Faith and Reason” -  I Our vocabulary offers us two words:“faith” and “reason.”And we step quickly from the existence of words to the existence of things, with the accepted theory telling us on one hand that reason has been bestowed on us and on the other that faith can be awakened in us, and that it is a matter therefore of two distinct (but complementary) modes of understanding. Let us specify. The accepted theory (which like all accepted theories is a recent theory) takes as its basis an affirmation as old as philosophy itself, and which is a philosophical affirmation: human beings are defined specifically by logos, called ratio in Latin, and accordingly , by“reason”and“rationality.”In its Greek origins and as soon as it becomes Roman, moreover, rationality is unlimited. All that is given is grasped through the logos.1 What appears to us, whatever its mode of appearing may be, is given to thought and gives itself for us to think it; the idea of an irrational real can no more be formed than can that of a suprarational real.2 To be sure, Greece knows opinion, or belief, doxa. It also knows, at the same time, that one can“believe in,”that for example Achilles can believe in Patrocles. It has, moreover, a word to designate 127 the ensemble of the knowable: phusis, in Latin natura, which must not be identified too quickly with what we call“nature.”In this way, two important questions are never posed: that of an act of understanding in which we exceed our definition as“rational animal”and, as its corollary, that of an object of understanding that exceeds the field of phusis. However , these questions are posed when, in the Christian world, knowledge of God and knowledge of divine things present themselves as exceeding the limits of reason. Precisely what can reason do? A leap of almost eighteen centuries, from the origins of Christianity to the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, shows us that according to the self-definition of reason, its access to God and to divine things is as narrow as possible: a “religion of pure reason”can at most postulate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and pose transcendentally the existence of the community of those who thus believe. And if we move then from Kant to the First Vatican Council, here again reason, enriched by its“natural light,” can do no more than affirm the existence of God and the immortality of the human soul. In the meantime, certainly prepared for a long time, there appears in the work of Scheeben an entity such as the “supernature”(French surnature, German Übernatur).3 For the unity of the Greek cosmos there will thus have been substituted a theory of two worlds—the world of reason and the world of faith—and a frontier will have been traced. On one hand, there is the “reason” by which we know that God exists,and on the other hand there is the“faith”by which we know God is Trinity; on one hand the “reason” by which we know God as accessible, and on the other the “faith” by which we know God as supremely accessible in Jesus of Nazareth; and so on. From the origin of the theory to its latest forms no one would ever say that faith is without reason. It exceeds reason, and in this excess it does not cease to possess the character of knowledge, of gnōsis. All the same, here and there and in a manner increasingly forceful as“faith”and“reason”are inclined toward strict opposition, the two words tend to designate two distinct faculties, until it is affirmed to us, at the end of a long history, that“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”4 The line that we have just cited from Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et ratio is ambiguous. On one hand, it affirms that one (faith) is 128 Jean-Yves Lacoste not without the other (reason). But on the other hand, it also affirms that one is not the other, and that we are thus capable of both. Domain of the “rational,” domain of the “believable”: the two are found neatly delimited. And one will recall that throughout the nineteenth century...

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