The Narrowing of Reason must be Overcome to Recover the Integrity of Reason, to Recover Reality!

"The fact that God no longer appears to many to be attainable by reason is the fault not of an irrationality of the faith, but of the narrowing of our reason...

"...Beginning with Descartes' fundamental approach, there developed [an] 'absolutization of subjective conscience' which not only limited the perception of reality in general, but also resulted in a reduced concept of God...

"...The central core of Wojtyla's philosophy lies in the fact that he does not accept the separation of thought and existence that typifies the modern era.

"Descartes...severed thinking from existing and identified this isolated thought with reason itself: I think, therefore I am. But it is not thought that determines existence, but existence that determines thought...

"...God, who for St. Thomas, an heir of the biblical tradition, is subsistent being (which led Gilson to speak of St. Thomas's philosophy of existence), is now nothing but absolute thought. In the cultural climate that arose from this initial premise, the idea of God increasingly finds itself on the fringe, or better, a God who is sheer thought is already ipso facto relegated to the fringe. In this way God was gradually expelled from reality: Deism permits God to remain in existence, but he no longer has anything to say in the world. He has thus become for man a marginal hypothesis which he may or may not accept: whether or not he does no longer makes much difference...

"...This narrowing must be overcome. Reason must once again return to its integrity; if it does so, it will also once more see God...

"...[T]he pope's anthropology is theological... ...John (5)17: 'My Father is always at work, and I too am at work.' After the act of creation, God did not recede into the past; after the Big Bang he did not remove himself from the reality of this world. God is not a God of the past, but a God of the present and of the future...Christ is forever young."

Joseph Ratzinger in Communio, Volume 2: Anthropology and Culture, Pope Benedict XVI, eds. Schindler and Healy, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013, 144-146. From an article which first appeared as "God in Pope John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope," Communio 22, (Spring 1995).