By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — God didn’t create people with a yearning to know the truth but a lack of ability to find it.
That was one of the points in a presentation by theology professor Ryan Hanning, Ph.D., on St. John Paul’s thinking in his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio, on the relationship between faith and reason.
This isn’t some abstract topic, Hanning told a September 19 Zoom meeting of the Institute of Catholic Theology (ICT), based at St. Thomas the Apostle Church here.
Instead, the earliest question a young person asks, Hanning said, is, “Where did I come from?” At first this is on the biological level, but expands to questions of ultimate purpose.
God placed on the human heart the desire to rise to the truth, which is God Himself, Hanning told the meeting, and both faith and reason are necessary for the task, not just one of them.
“The Church has an obligation to journey with people as we seek truth,” he said, but on questions of ultimate purpose, the truth already is here.
It’s not that the Church has come up with the truth, he said, but rather received it from God.
At a Zoom meeting, of course, an attendee is technologically face-to-face with the speaker instead of perhaps having to see rows and rows of the backs of other people’s heads between the listener and the lectern, so there can be a greater sense of participation.
As he spoke, Hanning referenced portions of St. John Paul’s encyclical that appeared in teaching notes for the meeting.
“It is unthinkable that a search so deeply rooted in human nature would be completely vain and useless,” the future saint said. “The capacity to search for truth and to pose questions itself implies the rudiments of a response.
“Human beings would not even begin to search for something of which they knew nothing or for something which they thought was wholly beyond them. Only the sense that they can arrive at an answer leads them to take the first step,” St. John Paul said.
Hanning spoke by Zoom from his home in Whites Creek, Tenn., near Nashville, a country sort of existence he expressed an appreciation for.
His biographical information says he “led University of Mary’s unprecedented partnership with Arizona State University, and developed a graduate program in philosophy, theology and education for Catholic educators,” as well as teaching, consulting, and speaking internationally on education, theology, ethics and virtuous leadership.
The website of “Mary College at ASU” describes “an unprecedented partnership between the University of Mary and Arizona State University. Through this domestic exchange program, ASU students are able to take courses in Catholic Studies to fulfill general studies requirements — or even major or minor — all taught by University of Mary faculty in the beautiful and newly renovated Old St. Mary’s on the corner of College and University in Tempe.”
The Mary College site quoted a 2018 graduate, Haley York: “I chose the University of Mary first and foremost because of a huge desire in my heart to study theology. Not only was Mary able to provide an authentic Catholic education, but a solid Catholic community. It is easy to get lost in the midst of a huge, secular campus like Arizona State, but with the University of Mary, I felt like I was at home.
“I will forever be thankful for ASU and University of Mary’s partnership and the impact it had on my academic and spiritual life,” she said.
The Wanderer asked Eric Westby, Ph.D., director of the ICT, about the difference the pandemic has made in the way it holds its programs. “I think that, even without COVID, using video conferencing is a great way to have presenters from all over the world, and save on time and money,” Westby said. “However, have people in person, when we can, is great/preferred.”
When scientists begin their research, St. John Paul said, “they are confident from the first that they will find an answer, and they do not give up in the face of setbacks. They do not judge their original intuition useless simply because they have not reached their goal; rightly enough they will say that they have not yet found a satisfactory answer.”
Hanning told the ICT meeting, “To know God, you move from reason to faith” because, for instance, in encountering a mystery like the Trinity, “We can’t reason the Trinity, we just can’t.”
Nevertheless, “To truly know a person, what must happen?” They must communicate with us, he said. And “God by nature seeks to communicate who He is.”
“God wants to assist our reason” so we can make an act of faith, Hanning said. “God does not want to hide Himself from us.”
To think that faith suppresses reason is a form of fundamentalism, he said. People’s entire experience of Christianity yells out for both faith and reason — which, while they overlap, aren’t the same.
God doesn’t want to overcome people but to restore them, Hanning said.
Earlier in the study notes for the Zoom meeting, St. John Paul’s 1998 encyclical said that particularly at the present time, “the search for ultimate truth seems often to be neglected. . . .
“This has given rise to different forms of agnosticism and relativism which have led philosophical research to lose its way in the shifting sands of widespread skepticism,” St. John Paul said. “Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain.
“A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today’s most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth,” the Pope said.
In response to this, St. John Paul proposed to offer the fact that “Underlying all the Church’s thinking is the awareness that She is the bearer of a message which has its origin in God Himself. . . . The knowledge which the Church offers to man has its origin not in any speculation of Her own, however sublime, but in the word of God which She has received in faith.”
Hanning began his talk by recalling the early life of the future Pope, who was born as Karol Wojtyla in Poland in 1920 and in 1938 entered the renowned Jagiellonian University in Krakow, one of the oldest surviving universities in the world.
In 1939, Poland was invaded by troops of National Socialist Germany, which decided to suppress Poland’s intellectual life, and many of its professors were sent to concentration camps, Hanning said.
To avoid deportation to Germany, Wojtyla worked in a quarry and chemical factory, then quietly began his seminary formation in 1942, Hanning said, followed by his ordination in 1946 and theological studies in Rome.
After his successful dissertation, he returned to the Jagiellonian, where Poland was under Communist occupation, so the theology faculty there was limited, Hanning said, adding, “He mentioned that at an early age, he fell in love with human love.”
Successfully advancing in his career in only a decade, Wojtyla became an auxiliary bishop, then a bishop. He helped to write Gaudium et Spes, The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of Vatican II, and was appointed archbishop of Krakow.
In 1967, when he was 47 years of age, he became the youngest cardinal in the world, Hanning said.
“By Divine Providence,” Hanning said, he was being groomed for his upcoming papacy.
In 1976 he came to the U.S. Eucharistic Congress, in Philadelphia, lectured at the Catholic University of America, and was invited to give a retreat to the papal household of Paul VI.
The Fides et Ratio encyclical proclaims, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of 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.”
Later in the encyclical, St. John Paul said: “The desire for knowledge is so great and it works in such a way that the human heart, despite its experience of insurmountable limitation, yearns for the infinite riches which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be found the satisfying answer to every question as yet unanswered.”
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