Whoever thought it would come to this? Most secular philosophers today, proudly calling themselves postmodernist, have given up on the Enlightenment and reason in favor of an easygoing moral relativism. In discussing everything from Paradise Lost to law to biology, today’s "critical thinkers" strip away "patriarchal" objectivity to expose what they think is really real: power and interest. Today, the strongest and most unabashed defender of reason in the world appears to be the Pope. Voltaire, where art thou at this hour?

Faith and Reason

Marking the twentieth anniversary of his pontificate, John Paul II issued another meaty and important encyclical on October 15, titled "Faith and Reason." It concerns the widespread loss of confidence in reason, and its message to the human race is, Faith itself insists that the Creator gave you reason; be bold in your confidence in reason.

Faith and Reason is just over 150 pages long in the Vatican edition. The English translation, despite the occasionally garbled sentence, is poetic and elegant. Take the opening, for instance: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to contemplation of the truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know Himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves."

The first chapters of Faith and Reason recount both the history of philosophy and the wisdom literature of the Jewish Bible on the insistent questions about who we humans are. The God of the Bible wants us to use our reason—insists, in fact, that everything that exists is intelligible to its Creator and, derivatively, intelligible in itself. Therefore, inquiry cannot be in vain.

The Pope traces the attachment of the Catholic Church to reason from its earliest centuries, from Origen and Clement of Alexandria, through the great St. Augustine, and on to the often overlooked but pivotal poet of reason, St. Anselm of Canterbury. Like others, he sees in the serenity and universal vision of St. Thomas Aquinas, forged in intense dialogue with Jewish and Muslim scholars, a classic statement of the mutual dependence of—and essential difference between—faith and reason. Yet the Pope adds two further dimensions to the classic statements of Aquinas. He places them in the stream of historical developments, both before and after the thirteenth century. And he stresses the dimension of personal awareness and personal history—the drama of internal liberty in which all women and men become aware of powers of reason and of faith at different times in their lives.

Much of what the Pope writes is directed to bishops and theologians—that they should master the disciplines of philosophy and heed the vocation of philosophy, lest the data about God entrusted to the Church be simplistically and erroneously interpreted, the people asking for bread and being given a stone instead. He warns against fideism (the mere leap of faith, without an effort to understand, to probe, and to verify) and against simple-minded biblicism (parroting the Bible without noticing the shifting meaning of words, and the long centuries of reflection on each text, or critical decisions about meanings reached in the dramatic history of the Church).

On the other hand, if fideism and biblicism give to faith much that belongs to reason, the Pope also warns against rationalism and ontologism, which give to reason much that belongs to faith. Faith and reason need each other, but it is important to keep straight what each of them is and how they should work together.

The Crisis of Modern Humanism

Why did the Pope issue this encyclical now? It takes up the question that has gripped his entire life—the crisis of modern humanism. He has been telling friends for several years that he did not wish his pontificate to end without an encyclical on the issue.

There are also institutional reasons for its timing. Since the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, too many Roman Catholic bishops and theologians have scanted philosophy, partly for the good reason of promoting a revival of biblical studies. Others, particularly in the United States, have tried to be "pastoral" as opposed to being "intellectual."

Thus, a high degree of softheadedness, sentimentality, imprecision, and just plain fudging have infiltrated middle- and upper-class parishes and daily life. "Old time" religion, with its strong ideas of wrong and right, is out; "new moralities," like finding a middle ground on abortion and premarital sex, are in. In a church that prided itself on the courage to say Yes and No, the common style has become Maybe, Nudge, Wink, If, and Y’know.

The encyclical’s message to theologians and bishops is, Without lively attention to reason, Judaism and Christianity fall into sentimentality, superstition, and stupid parodies of themselves. The Pope writes that "a legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid."

This warning cuts through the mental torpor that permits many religious people to nurse incompatible moral sentiments: traditional values along with the refusal to make moral judgments. Americans see this in public responses to the Clinton scandal.

Nonetheless, the first result of the encyclical is likely to be a grateful response to the Pope’s evocation of a deep hunger in our culture. "Every man and woman is in some sense a philosopher," he writes. Since Socrates faced his own death, humans have participated in a conversation about the meaning of our brief lives. Unless we stultify our minds, we are not satisfied without the inquiry, Who am I? What should I do? Our most radical drive is the drive to raise questions. Before these personal but universal questions, many philosophers today feign stupidity.

In the Pope’s view, two of the great gifts of Judaism and Christianity to the world are the principles that the Creator understood everything about the world He created, loved it all, and saw that it was good; and that He made human beings in his image, capable of understanding and of loving. By that design, somewhere amid the empty galaxies there would be at least one creature capable of understanding God’s gifts and free to love in return (or not). The Bible assumes that there are hearers as capable of understanding and responding to it as to "the Book of Nature." Both have been produced by the same Creator.

Take away human understanding, reflection, and choice, and you deprive Judaism and Christianity of soil to root in. If reason dies, faith will die soon after.

The Pope understands full well that the experience of Nazism and then the long devastation of Communism have stripped many in the West of their confidence in reason. Nearly as devastating in America and parts of Europe has been a merely instrumental (pragmatic, utilitarian) conception of reason. People who think of their own reason as merely instrumental end up thinking of themselves—and others, too—as tools. Meaningless. Without point.

In the United States and parts of Europe, the Pope notes, moral relativism pervades the culture, as it did in Germany just before the rise of Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course, today’s rationale is very different—that relativism is the only safe "foundation" for tolerance. That, says the Pope, is self-deception.

A commitment to relativism means that reason is ultimately irrelevant, that there is only preference. In such a world, power trumps. The thugs will win. It will be no good protesting that what they do is unjust ("says who?"), or morally culpable ("oh yeah?"), or a tissue of lies ("say you"). Only a commitment to concrete truths, to argument in the light of evidence, makes humans free. Why? Because civilized people regard one another as reasonable and free and wish to persuade one another only in the light of evidence. Barbarians use clubs.

In the Pope’s mind, the loss of faith in reason means a loss of faith in each human being. This road is forbidden to Jews and Christians, who have always seen in women and men creatures made to be intelligent, inquiring, free, bold, and not created in vain. We are made in the image of the One who conceived us, loved us, and put us where we are for a purpose. In giving us faith and reason, this God gave each of us two wings. We will each need both of them.

Michael Novak, who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair at AEI, is the author, with his daughter Jana, of Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions about God (Pocket Books, 1998).