I
Our vocabulary offers us two words: “faith” and “reason.” And we step quickly from the existence of words to the existence of things, with the accepted theory telling us on one hand that reason has been bestowed on us and on the other that faith can be awakened in us, and that it is a matter therefore of two distinct (but complementary) modes of understanding. Let us specify. The accepted theory (which like all accepted theories is a recent theory) takes as its basis an affirmation as old as philosophy itself, and which is a philosophical affirmation: human beings are defined specifically by logos, called ratio in Latin, and accordingly, by “reason” and “rationality.” In its Greek origins and as soon as it becomes Roman, moreover, rationality is unlimited. All that is given is grasped through the logos. What appears to us, whatever its mode of appearing may be, is given to thought and gives itself for us to think it; the idea of an irrational real can no more be formed than can that of a suprarational real. To be sure, Greece knows opinion, or belief, doxa. It also knows, at the same time, that one can “believe in,” that for example Achilles can believe in Patroclus. It has, moreover, a word to designate the ensemble of the knowable: phusis, in Latin natura, which must not be identified too quickly with what we call “nature.” In this way, two important questions are never posed: that of an act of understanding in which we exceed our definition as “rational animal” and, as its corollary, that of an object of understanding that exceeds the field of phusis. However, these questions are posed when, in the Christian world, knowledge of God and knowledge of divine things present themselves as exceeding the limits of reason.
Precisely what can reason do? A leap of almost eighteen centuries, from the origins of Christianity to the Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, shows us that according to the self-definition of reason, its access to God and to divine things is as narrow as possible: a “religion of pure reason” can at most postulate the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and pose transcendentally the existence of the community of those who thus believe. And if we move then from Kant to the First Vatican Council, here again reason, enriched by its “natural light,” can do no more than affirm the existence of God and the immortality of the human soul. In the meantime, certainly prepared for a long time, there appears in the work of Scheeben an entity such as the “supernature” (French surnature, German Übernatur). For the unity of the Greek cosmos there will thus have been substituted a theory of two worlds—the world of reason and the world of faith—and a frontier will have been traced. On one hand, there is the “reason” by which we know that God exists, and on the other hand there is the “faith” by which we know God is Trinity; on one hand the “reason” by which we know God as accessible, and on the other the “faith” by which we know God as supremely accessible in Jesus of Nazareth; and so on. From the origin of the theory to its latest forms no one would ever say that faith is without reason. It exceeds reason, and in this excess it does not cease to possess the character of knowledge, of gnosis. All the same, here and there and in a manner increasingly forceful as “faith” and “reason” are inclined toward strict opposition, the two words tend to designate two distinct faculties, until it is affirmed to us, at the end of a long history, that “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.”
The line that we have just cited from Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et ratio is ambiguous. On one hand, it affirms that one (faith) is not without the other (reason). But on the other hand, it also affirms that one is not the other, and that we are thus capable of both. Domain of the “rational,” domain of the “believable”: the two are found neatly delimited. And one will recall that throughout the nineteenth century the bishops of Rome did not cease to fight against theories that permit the domain of the solely believable to encroach upon that of the solely rational (fideism) and against those that permit the domain of the solely rational to encroach on that of the solely believable (rationalism). These polemics are not dead, as is born out by the clarifications that the editor of Fides et ratio has considered it his duty to repeat. From the fact that they are not dead, can one then conclude that they are more than a survivor? We may advance some doubts.
1. The first doubt bears on the linguistic destiny by which the Greek phusis becomes the Latin natura and which presides at the birth of the concept of “natural knowledge.” The concept is at once positive and negative. It is positive, for instance, in the text of Vatican I, when it is a matter of saying that we can know God “by the light of natural reason.” However, it is also negative inasmuch as the God thus knowable is and is only that of theism. Two worlds are thus knowable: the “natural” world, over which reigns an absolute creator whose invisibility is revealed by the visible; and the “supernatural” world, to which only faith has access, and by a strict change of order. Now, is this “theory of two worlds” essential to theology? It has incontestably become essential to it. To be more precise, it has become essential when theological Aristotelianism, and with it an autonomization of the “natural,” was able to produce a strict theory of natural knowledge—of a knowledge that is not theological and that is philosophical. There is place for a natural knowledge of God when there is place for natural knowledge tout court, and when all continuity is broken between pistis and gnosis, or gnosis and pistis.
2. There is a posterity of theological Aristotelianism, unrecognized by itself as such, to be found in “rationalism,” exemplarily in that of the Enlightenment: from “natural knowledge” to “pure reason,” the step is easily taken. For however little one refuses to step from “reason” to “faith,” still, the idea of a strictly “reasonable” faith will soon appear. The idea is far from foolish. “Natural knowledge” and “pure reason”: we are there in the domain of what wishes to be sure and certain for us, always and everywhere, and which need not be willed in order to be known. Nature and knowledge fascinate because their truth is available to us. The “confession of the philosopher” such as Leibniz has penned does not pretend to take the place of the confession of the theologian. But already in Kant and elsewhere before him, on the other hand, the pretense is indeed made, as if the appearance of the idea of the “supernatural” was destined to end by annulling the existence of the supernatural.
3. It is not by chance that the most vigorous thinkers of the first half of the nineteenth century encroach without scruple on the frontier of “reason” and “faith,” or simply ignore its presumed existence. There is certainly place in Hegel for a concept of faith, but the intelligence of faith ceases to be theological work in order to become philosophical mission. What passes as the privilege of theology, apprehending God in his revelation, is in Schelling a philosophical task (and a task he achieves in such a way that philosophy never lets appear the necessity of a theology of the revealed God distinct from a philosophy of revelation). And in Kierkegaard, who assuredly refuses to call himself either philosopher or theologian, the distinction between the philosophical and the theological disappears purely and simply at the heart of a “thought” that thinks both faith and reason, and refuses to think either without the other. Thus nothing remains of the gap established between the rational and the believable, or between the solely rational and the solely believable. And if it is little certain that Hegel and Schelling, or even Kierkegaard, have fallen under the influence of Augustine, they are incontestably witnesses of a rationality that skirts the opposition of the natural and the supernatural in favor of a vision of humanity free from any “theory of two worlds.” Benefiting from a sensible certainty and enjoying absolute knowledge, to adopt a Hegelian example, are not the same thing. But the dialectical discontinuities between them do not rest on any caesura.
II
The first truths in the history of philosophy seem to resolve one problem, but mask the permanence of another one. It is incontestable that the God of Hegel is imposed on reason as a Trinitarian God. It is incontestable that the Schellingian project of a “positive” philosophy signifies that everything that has come—and it is as having come that God is manifest as Trinity—gives itself to thought ipso facto. And it is incontestable, finally, that if Kierkegaard knows a properly dramatic passage (a “leap”) between the kingdom of the nonreligious and the kingdom of the religious, he is capable of labeling “fragments” that speak only of Christology, salvation, and faith as “philosophical.” Now is it certain that God is given to thought purely and simply in the measure in which he says, “I AM,” rather than in the measure to which thought says who he is? If God appears, is this only for a consciousness in an act of intelligence? We are entitled to some doubt.
1. Here Kierkegaard furnishes us with the surest Ariadne’s thread. The God who “appears” in the Fragments—one who is present to us without giving us more than an index or two of his identity—does not appear in order to be thought or described. God does not appear in order to be described because there is nothing to be described other than a man like other men. And God does not appear in order to be thought because the sole aim of the appearing is to be loved by us. To appear in order to be loved and for this alone, however, requires that God be present in a kenotic mode: God must be loved but not dazzle. There is appearance, for there is presence in the flesh. Yet, and this is the important point, there is not appearance for thought or for belief. The God of the Fragments is not present for us to believe that he is present. God is also not present, a fortiori, in order for that presence to become the object of philosophical or theological thought. The sole logos to which Kierkegaard appeals is that of love.
2. The thesis of an appearing for love, appearing in order to arouse love, in the final account to be recognized by consciousness only in an act of love, thus leads us back to a major problem of phenomenology. The problem is that of the “lovable.” That there are lovable realities, no one will doubt. That there are furthermore realities that appear as such only to those of us who love them, almost no one will doubt: a prelude by Bach or the charity of Vincent de Paul is perceptible as such only if it is an object of our love. We perceive things, and we also perceive “values.” Intersubjective understanding occurs without difficulty when it is a matter of things that we see or perceive (the “we” is easily constituted), but occurs with greater difficulty when it is a matter of what we feel. The architecture of a prelude by Bach can displease. Vincent de Paul’s charity seems to elicit unanimity, yet nothing guarantees that we all be long necessarily to the community of those who recognize it. A conclusion is therefore inevitable: whether aesthetic or moral, or otherwise, value is proposed and not imposed. And if, by simple definition, what we love belongs to the domain of values, it is necessary to say that love comes to light in proposing itself and not in imposing itself (the entire problematic of Kierkegaard’s kenotic Christology is that of a God who refuses to constrain us to love him).
3. Must we then say that only those who love truly know? The thesis has been defended by Scheler, who on this point follows some impulses coming from Augustine and Pascal, and whom Heidegger cites without reservation. It calls for some parsing. On one hand the thesis outlines a general logic of relations between loving and knowing, while on the other hand it speaks of a strongly specific relation between us and him who is proposed to our love. Let us take particular interest in this second point. Only love, if we follow Kierkegaard, breaks through the incognito of the God who is present as servant. Now if this is the case, love does not follow from faith—as if we first recognize the God who is present in the flesh and then find that God lovable—but is instead purely and simply simultaneous with faith. We do not possess immemorial knowledge of God. We seem to have forgotten the occasion on which we have understood God’s name, and have pronounced it, for the first time. “One” has spoken to us of god as one transmits in formation, but without the words having permitted God to be revealed to us. But how, regardless of how God has been spoken of to us, and regardless of the texts thus coming into use, is it possible that God appears to us as such, in flesh and blood? It is clear what our response must be: it is on the condition of perceiving a lovability that we shall perceive accurately at all. This response needs to be further articulated.
Common sense tells us that we first perceive and then love. This is not completely wrong. Were there nothing to perceive, there could be nothing to love. What then is there to perceive? On this point, Kierkegaard is right, and Balthasar has borrowed from him more than he admits: there is nothing to perceive except love. The thesis is not merely rhetorical. One must make the acquaintance of Peter in order to then love him, and it is in loving him that one comes to fully know him. However, what holds for Peter does not hold for God, and in the latter case the idea of a knowledge that precedes love would be quite strange. To be sure, Peter merits being loved, and on more than one account, but he is powerless to excite that love. In God, by contrast, we are powerless to discern anything but a pure act of love, more fundamental than any pure act of being. Love can assuredly be misunderstood (can go unperceived), just as we can fail to perceive a prelude of Bach or a painting by Malevich as such. We can also interest ourselves in God without a care in the world for loving God: this is the case, for example, with the god of onto-theology, a god that is not interesting in itself. But it is in a single and same act that divine love, if it is recognized as such, is recognized and loved. To admit it, if one is willing to admit it, carries us far: it is to avow that faith and love are co-originary, and that one cannot organize a theology of faith that is not also, in the double sense of the genitive, a theory of the love of God. The conceptuality is awkward because the debt of Aquinas to Aristotle is on this point awkward, but one will not be wrong to say that love is the “form” of faith. Not only is no faith worthy of the name somehow prior to love, but also no faith worthy of the name can content itself with being solely an act of faith. Catholic devotion has known and still knows an “act of faith” no table (among other sins) for being neither an act of love nor an act of hope, as if it could be either dissociated from them or independent of them. At what price could we affirm that we know an Absolute who is not only content to reveal itself in love, but which has only love to reveal, since there is in it an identity of loving and being? The question dictates our response: if there is credibility, it must be under the form of lovability.
III
Phenomenological precision must be imposed. God appears diversely. God has appeared (in illo tempore) and speaks today in the Scriptures which have the value of Word, and if it is necessary to speak of lovability then it is also necessary to say that God appears in giving him self to feeling. It would be wise not to imagine the life of the believer as a perpetual act of love responding to a perpetual act of manifestation. “Loving” is here to be understood as a disposition more (frequently) than as an occurrence. From the fact that the Absolute is manifest (from the fact that it has manifested itself), we need not conclude that it remains in the act of manifestation: John of the Cross will always remind us, opportunely, that the final word of God has been pronounced, and that we should not expect any others.
Now the multiplicity of appearances does not forbid us from, but in fact requires us to, inquire after the phenomenality proper to what gives itself to love and faith. We have already made two statements concerning this. Things appear to us in imposing themselves on us: I can not not see the ashtray sitting on my desk, and this “I” easily transforms into a “we,” since the perception of the ashtray, provided I am seated at my desk, has the character of the inevitable, just as it would have for anyone else who might be seated in my place. However, it requires little description in order to assure ourselves that nothing is given to love and faith, together, without proposing itself rather than imposing itself. It is probably beliefs that are imposed on us (and this is in fact the case with the majority of our beliefs). I hear a ring at the door and believe that it is Peter, because I expect a visit from him. I believe that it is raining, having heard a sound like rainfall but without casting a glance out my window. I believe that a theory is correct because the scientific community supports it almost unanimously, though I do not have any other means to “justify” my belief. And to this list, we could now add an embarrassing case: I may believe that there is a God because I belong to a community that shares this belief. However, the “credible” does not always impose itself on us. I do not want to believe that it is raining, but a glance out my window constrains me to believe that it is indeed so. But if what is given to faith is intelligible only in giving itself to love, then the appearance takes the form of solicitation or invitation, and not at all that of constraint. Love has its reasons, whether it is a matter of the reasons of the love that God shows to us or of the reasons that bring us to respond to this love with our own love. In any case, love, when it makes its appearance, would contradict its own essence or theme if it exercised constraint. If God appeared in his glory, Kierkegaard thus teaches, he could not be loved authentically, for love wants equality. His incognito, to be sure, is not absolute—it is proposed to us to love “the thing unknown”—but the extravagance of the expression cannot conceal from us that, even on Lutheran terrain, some thing like a minimal motif of credibility is necessarily maintained. It remains essential—and Kierkegaard is not the only one to have seen it—that it would be contrary to love for it to appear violently.
Phenomenality of the believable, phenomenality of love: the two are theologically one and one only. What is proposed for belief, we have already said, is nothing other than divine love. Because this proposal comes by way of mediations—mediation of Scripture, mediation of affective experience—it is possible for us to not perceive it as what it properly is. A theology that would forge the divine identity of love and being (or the divine subordination of being to love; it matters little which) would run the risk of repressing this proposal. Where human love is proposed, it is possible for us to be mistaken or, if one prefers, see nothing (the other person is simply present, leaving us free to feel his presence as that of someone worthy of being loved), or see something else (the other person is simply present, but we are not interested in him as a someone who invites us to love but instead, for example, as an intelligence that we admire or an elegance that we envy, etc.). And where it is a matter of the divine love that proposes itself to us, we can also be mistaken: we can “criticize” the Gospels, dissociating the incontestable love of a man, Jesus, who has disappeared leaving only traces, from the divine love of a God in whom we do not believe. It is, in other words, possible for us to not perceive the ample divine movement which, from alpha to omega, rules only by a logic of love; we can interest ourselves in the letter of the texts without knowing that “everything that does not lead to charity is figurative.” Because it is proposed without constraint, love perpetually courts the risk of failure (de l’chec).
IV
The failure is of a single piece with the failure of faith. What would it mean to believe without loving? The reduction of faith (faith-in) to a belief, itself distracted from a series of beliefs in propositions, would certainly permit the advent of an “I believe” dissociable from every “I love.” However, the propositional theory of revelation is dead, or should be. And if on one hand the act of faith does not open on statements but on things, and if on the other hand those things reduce to a single one—the revelation of divine love—then the idea of a faith independent of all love and all hope is without any legitimacy. Well then, if the destiny of love and the destiny of faith are bound together, one must take another step and suggest that if the lovable proposes itself without imposing itself, it is equally proper of the believable that it appears with the same discretion.
Reason is exercised through concepts, and the work of concepts aims at constraint. Here the “I” is present only accidentally. If “I am right” in the strong sense of the term, then we must all agree with “my” reasoning. All must do so, we emphasize, for in this case we are not called upon to exercise the least act of freedom. We must certainly think freedom in order to understand for ourselves what it is to not exercise even the least act of freedom, and we cannot enter into agreement with what is supposed to impose itself in the name of reason. Yet if it is therefore to an ideal image of the work of the concept that we always appeal, and to an image that perpetually contradicts our philosophical disagreements, we do not for all of that have to renounce the idea of a real that imposes itself independently of any exercise of freedom or acquiescence. The pen lying on my desk imposes itself on my perception. The conclusion of a logical demonstration likewise imposes itself on us (however little we might accept the logic to which one has recourse in this case). And no work of pure rationality can tell us that it is forbidden to put pressure on us, and that we are free to give to it or withhold from it our assent.
A single criterion imposes itself: self-evidence. This has been defined as “experience of the truth.” And the definition must be rendered with due precision: the truth is not experienced in freedom, but imposes itself on us. How is it then with the believable, which is to say the theologically believable? That it does not impose itself on us is too obvious for it to be necessary that we insist on it. Under certain conditions, I necessarily believe that it is raining: certain conditions put pressure on me, and my freedom and will are bracketed. When, however, I believe that in a man present in history God himself has been present, no constraining reason can govern that belief. The history of apologetics and of theology has surely been one of a surplus of reasons. Pre-understandings, expectations, indexes, and so forth have all made it such that Kierkegaard’s “thing unknown” is well and truly knowable and that this knowableness is not irrational. Nonetheless, the reasons on which this knowableness rests properly solicit without obliging. To appear as believable, to appear for faith and faith alone (provisionally, we leave between parentheses the fact that just an appearing is for faith and love indissociably), is thus to appear for freedom, and to place what appears at the mercy of freedom.
In this way, a fundamental mode of phenomenality presents itself for elucidation. To accept belief is to experience a truth: it is thus necessary to speak of self-evidence. Now evidence is there only for those who give their assent to what is proposed as believable. The agreement therefore confers the evidence, and it is necessary to say that the latter was previously absent. There certainly was credibility, perceived intuitively or manifest by force of reason. But where there was credibility, the truth, once again, occurs only in proposing itself to us: it will be only obvious to us that we ought to ratify this proposition. Evidence is thus the daughter of such a ratification.
Phenomenality of the lovable, phenomenality of the believable: the two are but one, at least theologically, and without inflicting the least brutality on philosophical reason. We have already stated the reasons: the credendum is nothing other than divine love; the site of faith is the human love that responds to this divine love; credibility and lovability cannot put pressure on us as does the splendor of a work of art. It is possible—and more than that, certainly probable—that phenomenology has traditionally granted a position of force to phenomena whose appearing imposes itself on us, to the visible, to propositions rich with meaning, to everything the reality of which cannot pass unperceived. Now if there is a singular property of the believable and the lovable, it is that believability and lovability can pass unperceived. The incognito of God cannot be absolutely pierced, and the indexes of his identity cannot be deciphered. What we cannot recognize except according to an act of love can be treated in an “everyday” mode, whether in remaining at the surface of what we see or (according to an example from Kierkegaard) in treating it as what it is not (strictly philological approach to the Scriptures). To the Kierkegaardian concept of the paradox, it can thus be useful to respond by proposing that of a “paradoxical phenomenality,” of an appearing that undoes all the common laws of phenomenality. Such a phenomenality is paradoxical because we will be incapable of receiving it as what it is if we reserve for it the same reception that we give to every phenomenon that does not appeal to our freedom. It is paradoxical because it cannot be perceived if a decision to see does not preside at the perception. And it is paradoxical because everything that we cannot perceive independently of such a decision to see—to believe—conceals itself from us. There is no lack of reasons to believe. We can even form a concept of “believableness” or “credibility” in order to indicate the moment when the decision to believe is imposed on us as the only morally legitimate decision. At the beginning, however, is a real that proposes itself without imposing itself and which is experienced in the element of nonevidence.
What we have just asserted does not hold only for the theological. Of the other man, too, it would be legitimate to say that we do not know him if we do not love him. The work of art does not appear to us as such if we do not allow ourselves to be moved by it—and we are capable of seeing it as only an object among other objects. Understanding and affection are partly linked. There is no going back over what we cannot let pass unperceived (exemplarily, all that sensation presents to us). But would not the richest phenomena be those that do not impose themselves on us, and that, if they give themselves in order to affect us, do so from more than the simple fact that they are objects of perception? A work of art can seduce us in the moment in which we perceive it, and even if we are distracted then by a memory, we do not cease to know that it has moved us, thus that we have loved it, and that these past occurrences authorize a certain prediction: when the work reappears, it will be able to move us anew. And yet the present of appearing can be that of a perception devoid of emotion. The other person, rather than appearing as someone I truly encounter, can be someone I am content to pass by and who will remain for me faceless. We may add an example. A scientific theory—mathematical, physical—can serve me as only an instrument of calculation or prediction. It is possible for it to appear to me only in the mode of utility. And if this is the case, I perceive neither the elegance nor the simplicity of the equations, nor the intelligence that has presided over the choice of axioms; in short, I certainly can acquire an understanding of the theory, but only superficially, and it is clear that the theory, reduced to its instrumentality, cannot move me as does a work of art, which it, in its own right, also is.
This last example is important for us, for enabling us to see that not only does (aesthetical) feeling include an act of understanding, but the work of understanding may be necessary for the genesis of emotion. Only the good mathematician will perceive the elegance of the theory and treat it with the respect that one owes the work of art, and good mathematicians are rare. Rare too are those who emote the moment their eye falls on a pictorial style with which they are not familiar: those who do not know painting more recent than that of the Impressionists would have to be taught to see in order to perceive the beauty (we cannot speak of elegance . . .) of a canvas of Malevich or Mondrian. Here the distinction between feeling (French: sentir) and work of reason strikes against an obstacle. What is more rational—a successful formalization—gives itself completely to feeling. In order to feel such a work of art, one must first learn to see in order to then learn to feel, and the apprenticeship of the gaze must be as rational as possible and must therefore appeal to what imposes itself purely and simply to every gaze. Several points are thus brought to our problem.
1. The first is that it would be erroneous to think that “faith” breaks with the modes of being and understanding that precede it. The Catholic tradition affirms that God can “with certainty be known with the help of natural reason,” and a hyperbolic text issuing from the same tradition goes so far as to use the language of demonstration. These texts have the wisdom of taking up the language of the possible, and refuse recourse to any itemized account of knowledge or demonstration. They must still be taken seriously: God does not belong to theology. There is more. The name of God has a theological history, and one can never place it at the end of the history—there where God appears only as love and in order to be loved—without knowing that it is by this history, and this history alone, that he can be recognized as the Absolute present in the form of the servant. Kierkegaard, whose theology of the incarnation makes no use of the ancient covenant, is thus constrained to speak of a god that we neither expect nor foresee. Now, human beings have well and truly spoken of God, and have done so with sufficient precision before he was manifest definitively. And it can be useful to recall that Clement of Alexandria, of all theologians the most attached to noting that there can be no final word without a first word and a penultimate word, admitted the existence of three testaments—the old, the philosophical, and the new—and placed almost on equal footing religious preparation and rational preparation for recognition of the God who is present in Jesus Christ. A faith that precedes rationality, a rationality that precedes faith: in both cases, understanding arrives in the element of a continuity as strong as any discontinuity.
2. An idol is thus in need of destroying, namely the Pascalian opposition of the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob” and the “God of the Philosophers and sages.” It is indeed an idol, for the opposition is not content to be a venerable relic but finds itself so well venerated that it is canonical. But the opposition is false, and its cult harmful. It will be noted first of all that it is without object, if one is willing to interpret the texts of those—Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard—who ignore the existence of a frontier between philosophical reason and theological reason. There is more, and as excessive as it may seem, the position of Clement of Alexandria is perfectly rigorous on the matter. Clement does not say that philosophy “comprehends” God, but that it prepares us to comprehend him, or more precisely to understand him. In the same way, he says that the Jewish Bible genuinely teaches us to know God, but that this knowing is wracked by incompleteness, and that it is inseparably both knowing and nonknowing. And in contending that the same work of revelation began in the alliance with philosophy and in the alliance with Israel, he forces us to admit that the first word belongs neither to a faith preceding “the” faith nor to a pure reason that would precede pure faith: in order to believe in him who comes in the form of a servant, one must either have already believed, or have already proceeded to a rational affirmation of God. Both of these are in fact forms of expectation and precomprehension.
3. Preliminary work of reason, preliminary work of faith—we can co-enumerate them and assign them a same function only on one condition the rational/philosophical affirmation of God must be interpreted as a response to a manifestation that God no longer has the power to impose on us. The Vatican I text to which we have already referred states that God is always accessible, everywhere and to everyone: anyone engaged with visible things “can” acquire (a certain) knowledge of God. All the same, this possibility—that of a “knowledge” and not a “demonstration”—is not tied in the text to any constraint, but rather takes on the appearance of a task, a task that is proposed explicitly only after the Absolute has revealed itself and pronounced its final word. Should we say that our commerce with the created imposes on us that we acquire knowledge of God, or that such knowledge is proposed to us? The second alternative is best. Not only are philosophers few in number, but there are still fewer among them who know with certainty the existence of God and can utilize “God” without using the word mistakenly. Yet the philosopher is only a philosopher, and if one can define the “sages,” with Heidegger, as “die im Verstehen lebenden,” the philosopher must therefore be defined as the one who wishes or would love to live in the act of knowing—and to whom it is not guaranteed that it will be possible to avoid misunderstanding. A mathematical demonstration imposes itself on us regardless of whether certain preliminary conditions (agreement about axioms, e.g.) are satisfied, a sensory presentation imposes itself on everyone regardless of whether a preliminary condition is satisfied (as a matter of our disposition to the requirements of our sensory apparatus), but the philosopher, in contrast, proposes to us more reasons than he imposes on us. Now if there is in this instance a proposition, one can only conclude that the God of the philosophers, or of the philosophies, is offered to us as a believable God. The principal task of philosophy is not to speak of God. It nonetheless comes to speaking about God. It does so in such a manner that its words wish to constrain: the Thomistic five ways, as a brief philosophical preamble to an ample summa theologica, wish to constrain us with concepts. It remains true that we can refuse our assent to a logical proof, and can refuse it to a philosophical “proof” of the existence of God. And this means that the “God of the Philosophers and the sages” is proposed to an assent just as is the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
V
There is no use in concealing the aim of the foregoing developments: to erase the boundary found classically between faith and reason, and to erase it because it has existed only in an arbitrary manner. Let us rejoin Clement of Alexandria’s provocative and fertile thesis concerning the “testamentary” character of philosophy. According to Clement, “to believe” in the God of Abraham and to prepare oneself philosophically for the manifestation of the God of Jesus Christ take part in a same logic. It matters little that there is in the one here a logic of “faith” and in the other there a logic of “reason,” and it matters little that both ways attend to the God who is manifest in Jesus Christ. What is important first and above all is that the first major decision taken by Christianity—the refusal of Gnostic anti-Semitism and the establishment of a strict identity between the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ—here accompanies an equally important decision: the refusal of what would eventually be the Pascalian opposition.
What is important next is that regarding the God “of the Philosophers” we cannot truly say that we “know” that he exists unless this knowing is accompanied by free assent. Earlier, we evoked the case of the God of Hegel, Schelling, and Kierkegaard, and it is not useless to return to it now. In Hegel, faith is destined to be absorbed into a knowledge, but it is not enough to read the Phenomenology of Spirit beginning from its final section; one must still observe that no one reaches absolute knowledge without having passed through faith. The Schellingian philosophy of revelation assigns to itself the overly modest aim of only thinking what has taken place, but the phenomena that preoccupy this philosophy (the manifestation of the Absolute in history) are no mere facts among all the other facts, and interest us only because the Absolute is revealed in them. And when Kierkegaard, in the Fragments, proposes a conceptual schema where Christology, soteriology, and so forth do not pretend to have any coherence other than that of logic, he applies himself to the work of what must finally be called by its proper name: the intelligence of faith.
No faith without rationality, none that will contest it: the believer is an animal who speaks and who reasons, and the “credita” are likewise “intelligibilia.” No rationality without faith, and in any case none without belief; it is on this that we must insist here. That there is a place for “pure reason,” no one will doubt. However, what is more important lies elsewhere, in the figures of the rationality in which the true does not evoke adherence solely because it is said, and where faith preexists itself in multiple links with reason and with belief. Is the God of “the Philosophers and the sages” a God of pure reason, thus of a reason free and clear from faith? We have already responded in the negative. We concede that God is “always greater,” and that the final words of God critique as much as they confirm what we have taken the initiative to say of God. But to the degree that Clement’s thesis is correct, we must then also admit that what we have taken the initiative to say philosophically of God is said within an economy of revelation, and benefits from a divine caution. The classical (?) distinction between “natural” and “supernatural,” of “natural knowledge” and “supernatural knowledge” of God, thus appears highly problematic. The God “of the Philosophers and the sages” seems to be at our disposal, to be knowable by anyone who has reason and agrees to put it to use. But exactly what do we mean here by “knowing”?
One distinction is required in order to bring all affairs to a halt: that of calculation and thought. Calculation requires adhesion; as the example of Leibniz (and his posterity) shows us, philosophical reason can always dream of taking the form of calculative reasoning. But thought, to which geometrical work does not properly belong, and which collapses whenever it mistakenly thinks that such work does be long to it, is “personal” work before it is “rational” work, and we cannot describe this work without noticing that it rests on beliefs without exposing them to doubt, and above all without noticing that it leads to certain decisions. The phenomena that are proposed to us may be more numerous than those that are imposed on us. And if to some degree thinking always is equivalent to binding descriptions together, then we cannot do it without apprehending the phenomena in the “how” of their appearance—and thus phenomena can appear to us as offered to a free adhesion. Thought is never devoid of all decision. When it is a matter of realities that are “created” (but that we do not yet know are created!) and that allude to a “creator,” it is by us, in our integrality, rationality, affection, and decision, that this allusion would be accepted. The idea of pure reason is thus destined to collapse, or at least to close itself within the narrow confines of the strictly demonstrable. There is the real whose reality is imposed on us—and Husserlian phenomenology has come to tell us that appearing is being—and there is the real of the being of which we cannot deny that it is given to us in flesh and blood. Husserlian phenomenology nonetheless does have the means to exceed itself from within, and what appears to us in proposing itself to us is perfectly thinkable there. The humanity of the other person, for example, can pass unperceived, and the situation described by Lévinas is in fact ideal (and rare): the other person, he suggests, appears to us in a manner constraining us to recognize him as another myself, and perhaps more. It is likewise possible for the work of art to not appear to us as such. And one must have already seen armchairs in order to perceive an armchair. Such examples are as innumerable as they are varied.
In any case, one point is of greatest importance: a reason emptied of freedom—an act of reason that puts out of play every act of freedom—is a possible reason (calculative reason), but the reason that applies itself to the work of thinking is a reason that integrates freedom. Calculation does not know the logic of assent except under the form of constraint. But thought does know this logic: we never truly think without deciding to take part. Nothing forbids us the dream of total transparency about everything, a dream unlimited by evidence, such that it would have only to “see” and would have nothing to decide. But here and now, in a world that is not governed by our dreams, perfect self-evidence is rare. It is perfectly evident that an ashtray sits on my desk and that 2 + 2 = 4 (assuming that we know what it is we speak of, and what our words mean). However, it is not certain that the visible owes its being to a first and invisible cause. And even if we will have done our best to demonstrate it, the demonstration, as distinct from one that is logico-mathematical, will not impose itself on us. Perhaps it will offer us a way to see the universe otherwise than as before, but it will nonetheless do so in the form of a proposition. It will be up to us in our freedom, then, to take a step toward saying not only that the Absolute “can” certainly be known but also that it truly “is” known thanks to such a demonstration. It is significant that no “proof” has yet been able to elicit an intersubjective agreement as clear as that which is elicited by mathematical proof. When we apply ourselves to thinking, thinking appeals together and at once to both reason and freedom.
It is therefore only superficially troubling to say that faith (“super-natural”) preexists in “natural” knowledge of God, and that we do not venture into the territory of the latter without being fitted with a freedom to accept it. “Natural reason,” “supernatural reason”: the continuity is more remarkable than any discontinuity (and we will always have the right to ask what justifies the discontinuity). To be sure, the latter does exist. The knowledge said to be “of faith” perceives the Absolute in the past of a history, and today in the sole measure where this history gives form to the present—whereas the knowledge called “natural” perceives the Absolute in a present that is sufficient unto itself (i.e., the present of causality, of finality, of the dialectics of action, and of still other presents). What is perceived now requires our assent: it is useless to come back on this point. But does it require assent more, adhering now to a phenomenological interpretation, than what appears to us from the past? It certainly requires it differently. On one hand is what appears in the element of presence, on the other hand is what appears in the element of memory. Their evident difference in manner of appearing cannot, however, obscure the fact that in both cases it is not to the “impartial spectator” of Husserl’s middle works that there is appearance—and that if we were to allow such an impartial spectator to occupy the terrain in question all credibility would necessarily escape that terrain. The phenomena that preoccupy us here cannot in fact be recognized as such by an “impartial” gaze. They appear without us, but they require our assent in order to reach intelligibility. Reason is “pure,” or in any case works in the richest mode, only when allied with the freedom of assent. And it is of such a reason, and not of that which rests exclusively on a calculus of concepts, that one speaks when inquiring after “natural” knowledge of the Absolute. This is likewise the case when faith comes into play. The revealed Absolute gives itself to be known. And if what it gives—texts and other traces—differs from what is given to “natural” knowledge, still it gives them freely to the coupling of reason and free assent. There is no “faith” without “reason,” and rare is the “reason” with which freedom does not collaborate.
Self-involvement, commitment: the locus of election for such acts is the experience called “religious,” and not the “supernatural” act of faith. We have nonetheless said more about this than Ian Ramsey, when we extended the field of “religious” experience to that of the rational affirmation of God. This was not in order to deprive the latter of its rationality and to submit it to the arbitrariness of our decisions, but instead to circumscribe a phenomenal field in which rationality appeals to freedom. Rejoining an earlier example, let us recall that for those who are familiar only with figurative painting, an entire work of reason (an entire apprenticeship of perception) is necessary in order for an abstract painting to appear as such. But this apprenticeship cannot guarantee certain access. Perhaps we will never perceive a work by Malevich as what it is. Perhaps, likewise, the causa sui or “first cause,” or the “absolute idea,” will appear to us only as a thinkable entity but never as a believable entity. Nothing could be more common than perceiving or understanding without taking part: the perception of an ashtray on my desk does not require me to take part, nor does the conclusion of a logical argument (again, assuming that we grant—or “stick to”—the logic at the interior of which the argument itself unfolds). But when the Absolute intervenes, taking part is necessary. God does not appear to us as the Alps appear to us, like a great object the existence of which would impose itself on us. And God does not appear to us at the end of a constraining argument like the one that constrains us to admit that Socrates is mortal if he is a man and all men are mortal. God appears to us, on the contrary, as that in whose favors we can take part, or not.
VI
Thus is opened an entire region of experience in which perception, in the largest sense of the word, is insufficient to generate assent but only makes it possible. In this region of experience it is not certain that we must distinguish brutally (with the brutality that distinguishes “natural” and “supernatural”) the assent that we grant to a first cause and that which we grant to the identity, in God, of being and love. Even the God of Aristotle moves in being the object of a desire in which one may see a modality of love (though this desire—and the specification is not unimportant—is provoked necessarily by the desirable). And if we bear in mind that the God of the philosophers is the God of the philosophers, then we also keep in view the bond between knowing and loving, and thus also knowing and taking part. When it is a matter of affirming the existence of God, it is inevitably a matter of affirming freely. Freedom certainly does not contradict rationality: we do not lack reasons for saying that “God” has a sense and a reference (though we do not agree on these reasons, and we content ourselves with affirming that access to them is not prohibited). But these reasons call upon more than “pure reason.” We can imagine being endowed with reason but not with freedom (why not?). Yet we do not inhabit such a world in which reason would thus reign, but instead the real world in which rationality and freedom are at some times dissociable and at others not. We thus can never praise possibility enough. Everything is opposed to the reasoning that would render necessary the affirmation of God. Whether it is in the so-called natural order or the so-called supernatural order, God is given to be known and given to be loved, and we never respond to love with love by necessity. In order to be able to grant our assent to the existence of God, we must decide freely and take part.
Do we rest, “fundamentally,” on our “reason” or on our “faith”? Is the assent that we offer to God the work of “reason” or of “faith”? At the end of the route that we have just covered it must become clear that we cannot have an answer. We perceive intuitively that a “demonstration” of the existence of God or an apologetic argument in favor of the truth of Christianity does not constrain us as does a mathematical demonstration. We can as well perceive that our assent to God is not a work of possible reason that is accompanied by interest and self-involvement—which is a cautious way of saying that we do not accomplish a work of reason without loving to do so. It does not belong strictly to theology to perceive in the how of its appearing a phenomenon that solicits faith and love; the problem is not exclusively theological, but embraces problems belonging to philosophy and to theology. There is an experience of truth (“evidence”) outside of any solicitation addressed to our freedom. We can “feel” that this is true at the same time that we “see” that it is true, but without our freedom coming into play: it is enough that we accept what is such as it is. But things are wholly otherwise when we occupy the interval of reason and faith. Fideism has thus been partly justified: here no conceptual constraint will suffice. But rationalism has also been partly justified: there is no clear boundary between the reasons that we invoke in favor of a First Cause and the reasons that we invoke in favor of an Absolute that is the “play of love with itself.” To theological reflection, nothing prevents us from saying that the God of the philosophers is not an available God but a God who is given to knowledge, and in a manner quite different than the God of Abraham is given to knowledge, but who is nonetheless given in both instances at the heart of a single and comprehensive economy of disclosure. And to philosophical reflection, nothing prevents us from saying that a divine manifestation which enters into history does not call for assent any more than does a manifestation that is given always, everywhere, and to everyone (even if the logic of its assent is different). Paradoxically, the God of the “Philosophers and sages” requires belief and even love. Rational affirmation of God’s existence includes an act of faith and an act of love.
By way of conclusion, we call attention to a recent text already invoked here, and to the translation in which it is inscribed. The papal encyclical Fides et ratio, bearing the signature of John Paul II, is a vigorous plea in favor of truth in a double sense: God as supreme truth, and truth as the milieu in which reason moves. At the same time, the text also invests its own title with the incipit that we have already cited: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” From a text that opens in this manner, one will not expect to have one’s suspicion aroused as to its problematic. Here is fides, there is ratio, the two are two, both are indispensable, and with the author we may turn to Aquinas for clarification of their relation: according to Aquinas, “faith supposes and perfects reason,” which the author considers to parallel the classical affirmation by which “grace supposes nature and bears it towards its fulfillment.” There is nothing new in this. And if one next inquires about the possible co-presence of an act of love and an act of faith, or of an essential relation between credibility and lovability, one finds oneself again in familiar territory: love of God (subjective genitive) is evidently there, the human love of truth and wisdom is also evidently there, and human love of God—how could it be otherwise?—is equally a part of it. Now, all of that said, it remains the case that the relation of knowledge and love is scarcely present in the text, and even then only in a rather ornamental manner. Can one address the relation of faith and reason without saying that God is present indissociably in ratio and in caritas? Whoever expresses love of the truth also certainly expresses implicit love of God. When, however, it comes to God, this implicit presence carries no weight in the text. And we must recognize that in the encyclical God is given to understanding without being given indissociably to love. The reason for this is probably found in the definition of God as first truth, and first truth which is not the other side of first love. The text, in short, does not fail to appear unsatisfying. And in these pages we have done nothing other than propose a redistribution of roles and a redefinition of boundaries that might prevent a slip back into a pattern whose sole advantage consists in being classical.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments, edited by Jeffrey Bloechl (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
