Lose Your Faith, Lose Your Reason
Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: Lose Your Faith, Lose Your Reason
So the last two Popes have been saying, though always more politely than that. I have recently experienced, in a most dismaying way, what happens when an entire culture places faith under suspicion, and relies upon the weak reed of unassisted reason. For reason divorced from faith collapses in upon itself. In a few minds it becomes the ratiocinative faculty alone, that which compares quantities, or that which attempts to reduce all questions to the deduction of conclusions from faultless syllogisms, as if life were nothing but geometry. In most minds it collapses into the pseudointellectual fad of the moment, usually a fad that bows down to the available alternatives to faith, which alternatives have been, since the days of Baal and Molech, sex and the city. Meanwhile, faith itself and also, though this is seldom seen, that more vibrant and fuller-blooded faculty of reason so championed by Benedict XVI in his speech a few years ago at Regensburg, and by John Paul II in Fides et Ratio must slink in the alleyways, scorned as half drunk, poor, probably thieving.
