We stand now on the verge of a new millennium. At such a point it is essential to appreciate the dimensions of the change which is taking place. For if we think of present changes as minimal or superficial we will not appreciate the extent of the creative work to which we are called and which the present circumstances make newly possible. The transition through which we are passing is not merely one of numbers from 1999 to 2000, nor is it simply a change within a given structure such as the election of a new political party, e.g., moving from a conservative to a liberal administration; indeed, it is more than merely a change between social structures, for the nature and value of structures themselves are in question. Rather, the basic transformation through which we are passing concerns the very way in which we think about life and values, sometimes referred to as a paradigm shift. It is then at the point of intersection of reason and religion.

Reviewing the history of human horizons during the present era, it can be said in general terms that the first millennium was focused upon God. It was the time of the messages of Christ and the Prophet — Peace be upon them both! — and its assimilation. The second millennium can be said to have focused rather on humanity. Its first half was absorbed in the reintroduction of Greek reason as found especially in the work of Aristotle. This project was carried forward by such figures as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Thomas Aquinas and Scotus. They used reason to understand better the message of the Prophets and to elaborate a comprehensive philosophy for the human person.

As noted in Chapter VI above, from 1500 modern life has been marked by a radicalization of reason. Earlier considerable attention had always been given to the thought of one’s predecessors and to how one could build thereupon — philosophers spoke of standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. In the middle of this second millennium the attitude changed radically. It was supplanted by an effort to clear away all prior thought in order to construct by technical reason a strictly controlled new pattern of thought. Thus, Francis Bacon called for smashing the idols which carried the wisdom tradition. John Locke spoke of erasing the entire content of the mind until it had the character of a blank tablet. René Descartes called for placing all under doubt until one arrived at an idea which was simply indubitable, and then building thereupon a structure of clear and distinct ideas connected among themselves by clear and distinct relations. This would constitute an asceptic laboratory of ideas, cut off from the long tradition of human engagement in God’s creation. The great cultures, as the cumulative results of the exercise of human freedom lived consciously in God, were to be substituted by a human artifact entirely dependent upon the specialized but restricted capabilities of technical human reason. This could develop analytically a scientific pattern of clear and distinct ideas which were universal and necessary, abstracted from the concrete and unique creative acts of human freedom.

The goal here was no longer the same as in the past, namely, contemplation of the magnificence and munificence of God. Rather, it was the establishment of speculative reason as power and control over all. Practical reason was reduced to utilitarian and pragmatic concerns in the service of humankind. Thus, the "Enlightenment" relegated religion to the position of a superstructure or even of superstition. By the beginning of the 20th century reason felt prepared to build the final utopia.

Now, at the verge of the third millennium, looking back we find this last century to have been instead the bloodiest of them all. Science has not been capable of generating a human utopia or Paradise, or even of establishing and defending human dignity. In contrast, it has implemented two destructive World Wars and invented atomic weapons capable of eliminating humanity itself.

The Cold War, which occupied most of the last half of the century, was a natural result of the attempt to live in terms of clear and distinct ideas. This meant the development of two interiorly consistent, but radically distinct world systems, which in operation inevitably opposed each other as the mortal enemies they were. On the one hand, there was the communist system developed on the basis of the philosophy of Karl Marx. This promised a scientific history which would culminate in an idyllic society. In fact it turned out to be cruel beyond belief. Correlatively liberal ideology developed a pattern of consumerism inherently incapable of generating purpose, meaning or satisfaction for human life, but oriented by its nature to exploiting the weak.

All of this generated a collapse of confidence in reason and a general skepticism, resulting in a nihilism both of meaning and of values, termed "post-modern". That, however, would seem to be a misnomer, for it does not really go beyond modernity, but stands rather as its last or critical stage in which its initial hopes and aspirations, as well as its major realizations, are subjected to a process of critique. It remains part of the modernity, however, because the critique is carried out in the modern rationalist terms of power and control.

Today, philosophy, seeing the destructive results caused by rationalism, comes to despair of these tools. Convinced that it must do something to stop this destruction and prevent its repetition in the future, but limited in its means to power and control, modern technical reason can only destroy its own principles and foundations, its structures and conclusions. In this it is similar to Sampson pulling down the pillars to which he was chained, and thus the temple itself, upon his head.

In response to this desperate situation of human reason on September 14, 1998 Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical entitled "Faith and Reason". In Poland before becoming Pope he had been a professor of philosophy and developed the philosophy of person and solidarity. This emphasized the dignity of the human person and the essential necessity of recognizing personal freedom in social life. This inspired, generated and guided the Solidarity Movement which in 10 years forced the first free elections in Eastern Europe since the Second World War. In the following six months the communist regimes in Poland and in all the Eastern European countries simply imploded.

Now, ten years later, it is no longer a matter of the collapse of merely the Soviet system, but a crisis of technical reason itself. Hence, in the face of the present skepticism concerning reason at this very end of the second millennium and looking to the aub of the new millennium, Pope John Paul II issued a 100 page document on the relation of faith and reason.

The contents of the Encyclical letter constitute a spectacular strategic inversion of the Enlightenment’s Promethean atheistic attitude, which had claimed rashly that only reason was worthy of humankind and that faith was but an unworthy superstition. In its place the Encyclical proceeds to assert mutually the confidence generated by faith in the ability of humankind to develop an adequate work of reason and the significance of this work for the life of faith.

On the part of God it sees Him as having made and saved man. Because human reason has been weakened by sin, God has sent Prophets to guide reason along its proper paths to its ultimate goal. Their messages are found in the Bible and the Qu’ran; they open human horizons to the source and goal of life and of meaning.

On the part of humanity, the Encyclical asserts the dignity proper to one who is created in the image of God and hence able to know him as source and goal. Humanity then must be capable of responding to God as its destiny. As human, this response is conscious as a matter of mind, but it is also free, responsible and loving — which Al-Ghazali described by the term "savoring".

In this light the Encyclical proposes a method for the interaction and cooperation of faith and reason which is circular in character. This begins from revelation and faith as proposed by the Prophets. Its goal is an increased understanding of God and His revelation through theology. In between these two, revelation and theology, there is the proper work of the development of philosophy or reason. This position calls upon reason not merely to provide some conceptual tools for theology. Rather, it evokes the highest efforts of reason, calling it to take up the most important issues which otherwise it might not have appreciated or treated by reason. Its position between revelation and theology helps to protect reason from lapsing into error or following paths which would not be adequate to the full dignity and destiny of humankind as described in the eschatology of the Holy Scriptures.

While so situated, philosophy should be understood, nonetheless, as a proper discipline in its own right. It proceeds in the light of human reason, on the basis of its own principles, and according to its own structures; it is responsible to its own rules of evidence. This is necessary in order that its conclusions be universal in application throughout the world and thereby enable deep and rich human interchange.

The "Enlightenment" had proposed human freedom in the sense of arbitrary choice among modes of self-assertion in the acquiring of possessions. In contrast, the eschatology in the sacred texts requires rather a personal and conscious freedom in order to respond to the gift of life received from the creator. It requires as well responsibility for one’s actions, if one is to be the subject of fitting and eternal reward or punishment in the final judgement and resurrection.

Both Islam and Christianity insist, though from different perspectives, that it is important to recognize the human nature of Christ. There are two approaches to this. One is from the revelation found in the sacred texts. This teaches that Christ was son of Mary, that is, that he was really born of human flesh and blood. This has the implication that Christ is truly and fully human. Both Islam and Christianity insist upon this.

The second approach is from philosophy. Here the crucial point in the history of human reflection on the humanity of Christ was the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Against those who would affirm only a Divine or a combined nature for Christ it was important for the Christian community (the ecclesia or church) to clarify that Christ was truly and fully human. Philosophy had developed a proper term to express nature, that is "physis". Anything less than this could be understood as only a generic — general, but not specific — human nature which could be only an appearance of humanity. Consequently, many held that it was necessary to use the philosophically elaborated technical term, physis, in order to be able adequately to teach the content of revelation.

For over a century there had been great discussion about doing this. Many held that only terms from Sacred Scripture should be used in official Church teachings and hence that the Council should remain with the indirect expression of Christ’s humanity by citing that he was the son of Mary. Others held, however, that the philosophical term must be used in order to state unambiguously the content of revelation. This latter position was finally accepted. In so doing the Church, as it were, "crossed the Rubicon," or decisive frontier, to engage in its articulation of the content of revelation. Such philosophical terms as physis and ousia which could be produced only by human reason.

This had been prepared during the previous century in the first councils of Nicea and of Constantinople. Hence forwarded it has been recognized that, given the evolution of the human mind, one could not teach the faith effectively to humankind without using terms from philosophy, that is, from reason. This opened the path for close collaboration between faith and reason. While forgotten under the impact of the Enlightenment, the Encyclical "Faith and Reason" reopens this collaboration as an urgent need not only for faith, but also for reason at this juncture and as of great promise for the future.

The Greek mind had difficulty with the spiritual nature of the human person. Aristotle had ingeniously managed to penetrate into the composition of changing things and to identify there two principles, form and matter, the form being related as act to matter as potency. Indeed, the two were so closely related, even by definition, that form was not conceivable except in terms of relation to matter.

Consequently, a serious problem arose regarding the development by the human mind of terms that were universal and not held to the particular time or place that characterized material things. In order to explain how the human mind could have such ideas the Greeks developed the notion of an active or agent intellect, existing in a state separated from matter. This could be employed by a number of human minds to separate the intelligibility of a concept from the concrete matter and hence uniqueness of concrete things. In contemporary technological terms, it was as if the properly intellectual character of human thought was supplied by a principle superior and separated from humans, and whose services, like a satellite, were able to be accessed by many persons. The unfortunate implication was that freedom, and hence responsibility, would not then pertain properly to particular persons and their process of thinking, willing and acting, but rather to the common agent intellect. In that case, it is difficult to understand as properly pertaining to human persons the facts of responsibility, immortality, last judgement and eternal reward or punishment.

In this passage Ghazali moves from waivering between staying in his post of teaching philosophy and the sciences and breaking away to follow the mystical path of the Sufis. He feels deeply called to leave, to "take to the road," but hesitates to leave his position as the head of the academy at Baghdad. So deeply does he experience the tension between call and hesitancy that there results a physical paralysis in which he could neither speak nor eat. Finally there follows the peace and liberation that God alone can give along with the strength to give up his worldly privileges and break away in order to follow the mystical Way of the Sufis.

One hundred years later Thomas Aquinas faced the same question, but responded in a different way. Rather then pushing reason and philosophy aside, he pushed it ahead. Here the decisive insight was that the power of God was manifested above all in his creation of the human person. In this light he was convinced of the proper existence of man under God. Further, to participate in God’s existence as a creature was to receive and exercise being in itself, that is to exist in one’s own right — standing, as it were, on one’s own two feet — and acting in one’s own right. In this light the human mind could not depend for its most proper actions upon another separated intellect, but rather must have within itself all the abilities needed in order to act according to its human, and hence intellectual and properly free, nature. This had to include the capacity to abstract universal terms from concrete and singular sensed objects. This opened the way to the rigorous pursuit of reason and science. Even more, it implied cooperation between faith and reason in the development of human knowledge, and with religion in the rational pursuit of life as a matter of committed human freedom and loving fulfillment.

As described by the Encyclical letter "Faith and Reason" philosophy should have a number of characteristics:

a. First, philosophy is not a slave to theology, nor does it even depend upon revelation for its premises. For in that case only believers would be able to develop philosophy or to use a philosophy so developed. In contrast, philosophy is an authentic work of human reason, proceeding according to principles and techniques which, in principle, could be developed by any human reason and whose conclusions would be valid for all humans, that is, universal.

b. Second, such a philosophy should be concerned not simply with some specific tasks, such as the development of formal structures, functional or utilitarian reasoning, or the phenomenological investigation of human consciousness. These are valid philosophical tasks, but not sufficient for a philosophic response to the challenge faith brings to reason to rise to its full potential and to provide human wisdom. For this, it must attain knowledge of being as such, that is: (1) of all being; (2) of being as true or open to the human intellect; (3) with its ontological, causal and communicative structures; (4) and hence open to God as the source and goal of all. Philosophy is then the deepest knowledge of all things: classically it is defined as knowledge of all things through their ultimate causes.

c. Third, philosophy must be objective, not simply reporting what people think, but revealing how things are (de Coel, I, 22).

d. Fourth, its content contains issues which by itself philosophy might not have taken up, but which it is called to consider by the context of faith and the challenge of eschatology. These include God as personal and creator; the human person as spiritual; human dignity, freedom and equality; the problem of evil; and the direction of life towards goals which go beyond or transcend the worldly concerns of power (politics) or profit (economy), and extend rather to the contemplation of God and to seeing him in others.

e. Finally, the mode of such a philosophy does not remain mere detached observation, but is rather a free and spirited response to God’s creation. It is therefore marked by love for life and knowledge as gifts given by God out of love. Iqbal describes in these words the proper sense of religion as it goes beyond philosophy:

If then we return reason to the cyclical context between revelation and theology, we find the following:

1. Faith promotes the human person; it insists on one’s personal and social freedom and dignity; and it calls on society to recognize, to live up to, and to fulfill this dignity.

2. Faith today calls for a recognition and defense of the human person, but it points also beyond reason. Where reason has tended to universalize structures which did not include the concrete and unique exercise of human freedom and gave primacy to the objective appreciation of things over against the human person, the context of faith bespeaks rather an engagement in human life as concretely and passionately lived.

3. A new awareness of human subjectivity, with its freedom and creativity, is emerging at this point of transition to the third millennium. These must now be taken into account. If the third millennium is to do so and in the process to integrate and heal the achievements of the first two millennia it will be necessary to develop an aesthetic dimension of human awareness which unites reason with faith, necessity with freedom, time with eternity, and this life with the path to God.

1. Al-Ghazali, Deliverance from Error and Mystical Union with the Almighty (Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1999), ch. III.

2. He had been teaching fiqh, which he still considered to be of value, even in contrast to kal m and medicine.

3. Takhy l: fakery, make-believe, fantasy.

4. McCarthy considers fear of assassination by the Batinites not to be the major factor here. He reads these paragraphs as a moving account of a classic personal religious crisis, ending in a true conversion. "He received divine grace which was at once a call and a help to personal holiness; he accepted the grace and really became a holy man." McCarthy p. 134, n. 172.

5. Qu’r n 27. 63/62.

6. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, ed. by M. Saeed Sheikh (Lahore, Pakistan: Iqbal Academy Pakistan and Institute of Islamic Culture, 1989), p. 143.

7. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

8. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, n. 105.