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| The School of Athens Raphael |
Faith without reason is blind.
Reason without faith is meaningless.
Christ--the eternal Word incarnate in history--puts the two together. In Him the Absolute and eternal Truth has a face, it is the face of charity: divine historical kenosis, perpetuated in His Church; sacramentally and in His saints, e.g. Saint Francis, Saint Pope John Paul II. The couplet above is just a matter of mutual honesty on the part of the believer and on the part of the philosopher. Integrity! Be real!
N.B. "The God of Faith and the God of the Philosophers: a Contribution to the Problem of Natural Theology" was the inaugural lecture of Father Joseph Ratzinger as a professor, also a chapter in his first book: Introduction to Christianity.
Saint Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius is the clearest exposition ever written on the unity of Truth and the two indispensable and complimentary ways of arriving at It: faith and reason. The culmination of the argument (qq. V and VI) involves the definition of resolutio and compositio distinguishing between the various reciprocal movements from human knowledge to divine knowledge and vice-versa, and the relationship between each of them in the service of the Truth.
It is very interesting to note Saint Thomas wrote this work also as his inaugural paper when he began as a professor, exactly the same theme as that of Joseph Ratzinger's. However, I have never seen Ratzinger even acknowledge that he knows at all of the existence of this Thomistic masterpiece. That is a question I should like to respectfully ask the Holy Father Emeritus for further insight.
Saint Thomas' Works in English
