By DONALD DeMARCO
Pope St. John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio is a thorough and thoughtful discussion of the harmony between “faith” and “reason.” It does not break new ground but reaffirms to a modern audience what St. Thomas Aquinas and more recent thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson have carefully explicated.
The encyclical is timely inasmuch as the erroneous belief is widely held, especially in universities, that faith and reason, belief and science, knowledge and religion are and should be kept apart from each other.
In January 2008, the faculty at La Sapienza University in Rome canceled an address that Pope Benedict XVI was slated to give because as one professor, speaking for many, put it, “Science does not need religion.”
Science’s debt to faith and religion, however, is well established. Referring to the accomplishments of the distinguished physicist and mathematician, Pierre Duhem, Stanley Jaki, who held doctorates in physics as well as in theology, stated: “What Duhem unearthed among many other things from long buried manuscripts was that supernatural revelation played a crucial liberating role in putting scientific speculation on the right track.”
In addition, Alfred North Whitehead, himself a distinguished scientist, points out, in Science and the Modern World, that “the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval theology.” According to science historian A.C. Crombie, “The natural philosophers of Latin Christendom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries created the experimental science characteristic of modern times.”
Five years prior to the publication of Fides et Ratio, Nannerl Keohane used her inaugural address as Duke University’s 13th president to repudiate the harmony between science and religion as well as the historical connection the former has with the latter.
The motto of Duke University, which was founded in 1838, is Eruditio et Religio. The incoming president was not aware of the school’s motto until after she assumed office. It left her “uneasy,” she told her audience and had “an archaic sound.”
The university’s 155-year “emphasis on religion,” she asserted, “seemed hard to square with the restless yearning for discovery, the staunch and fearless commitment to seek the truth wherever truth may be found that is the hallmark of a great university.” She might have had better reason to feel uneasy about the nickname of Duke’s 26 varsity sports teams: “The Blue Devils.”
President Keohane could, indeed, have found truth in the works of such early Christian scientists as Jordanus Nemorarius, Jean Buridan, John Philoponus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Nickolus of Oresme, and Leon Battisti Alberti. Jordanus is now a database accessible on the Internet that provides information about medieval manuscripts written in Western Europe between AD 500 and 1500.
We find a strong and clear incentive toward science in the Book of Wisdom (7:15-21): “For He hath given me the true knowledge of the things that are: the revolutions of the year, and the disposition of the stars, the natures of living creatures, and rage of wild beasts, the forces of the winds, and reasonings of men, the diversities of plants, and the virtues of roots, and all such things as are hid and not foreseen.”
Religion is hardly an impediment to learning. In fact, many, if not most of American universities were inspired by religious sentiments. Ironically, Keohane, after leaving Duke in 2004, took a position the following year at Princeton University whose motto is Dei Sub Numine Viget (Under the Protection of God She Flourishes).
Consider the founding mottos of the following Ivy League schools: Columbia University — In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen (In Thy Light Shall We See the Light); Brown University — In Deo Speramus (In God We Hope); Dartmouth College — Vox Clamantis In Deserto (The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness). The motto of Harvard and Yale, Veritas and Lux et Veritas, bear a certain similarity in name to John Paul II’s Splendor Veritatis.
The motto of Union University in Jackson, Tenn., is Duke’s in reverse: “Religio et Eruditio.” That of Colgate University is Deo ac Veritate (For God and for Truth). For the College of Wooster it is Scientia et Religio ex Uno Fonte (Knowledge and Religion from One Source). And that of the University of Denver is Pro Scientia et Religione (For Knowledge and Religion).
The trend among American universities to alienate faith and religion from knowledge and science is, from a historical point of view, fairly recent. Most schools of higher learning in the United States were founded under Christian auspices.
The current situation bodes ill for Catholic scholars who do not accept, and with good reason, this rather arbitrary disjunction.
Erudition alone does not make a person whole, important as it may be. One can be learned and a scoundrel. St. Augustine confessed that he was the most learned and most dissolute graduate of his school.
Something must be added to mere learning to complete the human being. This is what is signified by the term religio. Duke’s motto, Eruditio et Religio, originates from a Methodist hymn written by Charles Wesley, the brother of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. The third stanza of Sanctified Knowledge contains the words, “Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.”
Knowledge and virtue complement each other and are perfective of both the intellect and the will.
It is a strange phenomenon in the contemporary world of education that leaders of secular universities can detach themselves from their school’s founding principles, arbitrarily separate knowledge from faith, and then applaud themselves for being fearless, liberal, and inclusive.
Fides et Ratio offers an important and continuing corrective to schools of higher learning who are cheating their students by encouraging them to be knowledgeable without inspiring them to be good. The need for God is ever-present in the human soul.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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