Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 38

Perhaps more than any other Christian tradition, Catholicism affirms the importance of bringing faith and reason together. The Benedictine monk Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) coined the phrase “faith seeking understanding,” and those words have been a Catholic touchstone ever since. A hundred years later Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), one of the most influential theologian in all Catholic history, wrote that the goal of the Christian intellect is to use reason and intelligent reflection to turn mere belief into genuine knowledge. The foundational affirmation of the Catholic intellectual tradition is that Catholic faith properly understood and human learning at its best will never truly conflict, but will instead be mutually enlightening.

Faith has not always been properly understood and human learning has not always been at its best, so apparent conflicts arise frequently. History is full of examples, including the church’s unfortunate condemnation of Galileo in the year 1616 for his sun‐centered, rather than earth‐centered, view of the universe. But 1616 is a long time ago, and the notion that faith and reason, or science and religion, exist in a state of perpetual warfare is a fundamental misrepresentation of the Catholic tradition. Most Catholic intellectuals believe that, over time, further reflection and better information will lead to coherence between faith and learning. No one made this case more strongly than the British Catholic theologian John Henry Newman (see Voices of World Christianity 2.1).

Seasoned by a relatively high assessment of human intellect, the Catholic tradition has developed a style of theology that differs significantly from Orthodoxy. The Orthodox tradition, as explained in the previous chapter, has been apophatic in its theological orientation, often choosing to remain silent rather than to speak and take the risk of misrepresenting God or Christian truth. The Catholic tradition has taken almost the opposite approach. Though acknowledging that care must be exercised when using earthly images or ideas to describe God, the Catholic tradition says that using images and ideas is a necessary part of any robust articulation of Christian faith. Rather than remaining silent, Catholic theology is more likely to pile images and ideas on top of each other in its attempt to explore the depth of God’s being and relationship to the world.

The Catholic tradition insists, however, that these earthly images and ideas must be understood analogically when applied to God. An analogy describes one thing as being similar to something else, but always in a limited way. Thus, for example, Catholics say that God created the world in something like the way an artist creates a work of art, but of course there are differences. God does not have literal hands like an artist, and Catholics believe that God made the world ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), which is something no artist can do. Every other analogy has similar limitations, but these limitations are not necessarily defects; they allow room for intellectual advance. For example, the Catholic Church ultimately came to accept the theory of evolution by pointing out the limitations in the analogy of God as creator. To affirm that the world has an origin and purpose outside itself – that it was created rather than simply existing – does not necessarily imply that Catholics can claim any special knowledge about the details of how the world scientifically came to be. This kind of analogical thinking has allowed the Catholic tradition to develop and affirm many diverse insights regarding both God and the world.