Faith and Freedom:
A Battle for Intellectual Independence
Sherman Kuek
Published in Catholic Asian News (November 2008 Issue)
In the 2000-year life of the Christian faith, the Church has engaged in a great multitude of educational efforts. Taking the context of the West, the Church’s involvement in education is observable from ancient schools of rhetoric to the tertiary academic institutions of the High Middle Ages, from the elementary rudiments of grammar schooling to the sophistications of philosophical and scientific thought. Through these multiple levels and layers of education and human reasoning, she has been there.
True to the observation of the Pope John Paul II that a number of significant Catholic academic institutions grew ex corde ecclesiae (“out of the heart of the Church”), the great European universities such as Oxford, Louvain, Paris, Bologna, Prague and Padua arose from a Christian West. However, Western Catholic theological academia has perennially existed in a state of tension between faith and reason - between the search for logical truth and the fervour for divinely revealed truth - as if the two stood in contradiction to each other.
In February 1989, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) who was Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, initiated a new requisite for faculty members of all Catholic theological institutions to pledge upon a revised oath of fidelity and a profession of faith. Prior to this revision, the oath simply read as follows:
I firmly embrace and retain each and every thing which has been proposed by the Church regarding the teaching of faith and morals, whether defined by solemn judgment or asserted and declared by the ordinary Magisterium, especially those things which concern the mystery of the Holy Church of Christ and its sacraments and the sacrifice of the Mass and the primacy of the Roman Pontiff.
Evidently, the conventional oath emphasised the creedal aspects of the Catholic faith. However, at the dawn of this new announcement, the newly sanctioned oath replaced the old formula with three comprehensive statements:
With firm faith I believe as well everything contained in God’s word, written or handed down in tradition and proposed by the Church - whether in solemn judgment or in the ordinary and universal Magisterium as divinely revealed and calling for faith.
I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing that is proposed by that same Church definitively with regard to teaching concerning faith and morals.
What is more, I adhere with religious submission of will and intellect to the teachings which either the Roman pontiff or the college of bishops enunciate when they exercise the authentic magisterium even if they proclaim those teachings in an act that is not definitive.
This change was in all probability a response to the Vatican’s fear at the way in which many Western Catholic theological institutions were becoming increasingly secular in character. The past recent decades has witnessed a number of Western Catholic theologians either being formally censured (having their teaching licences revoked and removing their rights to be presented as “Catholic theologians”) or at least being perceived as dissident voices in the Catholic Church. The Vatican continues to monitor the movements of theological thought that flow from the Church’s theologians.
Surely and unsurprisingly, such an act of theological policing is construed by dissidents as an obsession with control on the part of the Church hierarchy. Cardinal Ratzinger’s policing activity while he was Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith had earned him the infamous title of “the Grand Inquisitor”. These dissident voices wavered with apprehension at their prospects for survival when Cardinal Ratzinger was subsequently elected as Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005.
Is he truly the power hungry control freak many dissident voices have made him out to be? Is his conservatism so acute that he would not allow for any freedom of theological exploration which might jeopardise the stability of the Church hierarchy? For a theologian so astute and thus widely published, it would seem strange for such accusations to ring true regarding the Holy Father’s own paradigm of theology and scholarship.
In reality, any Catholic theologian, no matter how “enlightened” or “modernised” in thought, would be well aware of the principle at work which has regulated the Church’s theological activity all throughout the past centuries. It is an issue of the nature of theology.
According to the Pope Benedict XVI, if theology “was [merely] a systematic reflection about questions of religion, about the relationship between man and God”, then it would constitute nothing more than a “science of religion”. Essentially, theology is a field of study that deals with truth that is “greater than our own thought”. The route of theology must therefore be characterised by the formulae fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”) and credo ut intellegam (“I believe in order that I may understand”).
Theology speaks of the work of God in bringing the human mind to grasp truths that are beyond its own initial capacity. It is about God helping the human mind to transcend itself and to recognise realities that are beyond its own powers to understand, let alone grasp in totality.
However, this does not exclude the role of human reason. Faith and reason can coexist, but not in the order prescribed by the rationalistic mind. For the Christian mind, faith precedes reason. Yet, the content of faith is never hollow or shallow, for this faith shall always be found rational, although the former is not on any account contingent upon the latter. Faith precedes reason and seeks to help reason to understand.
Hence, on the one hand, the Holy Father extols the virtue of academic freedom. But this freedom is, in his assessment, not an uninhibited one. True academic freedom is one that presents itself at the service of truth. For this reason, he emphatically posits that academic freedom should lead one to “search for the truth wherever careful analysis of evidence leads [it]”.
The Church does not advance a bias against the interest of academic freedom. In fact, academic freedom is so deeply valued that the Church seeks to ensure that ultimate truth must be recognised in the process of this search. Although the pursuit of scientific and logical findings and the recognition of divinely revealed truth both possess discovery methods that are autonomous from each other, both fields of truth discovery find their existence in the same Source. This means that both cannot contradict each other; there is a point at which both faith and reason must converge to reveal the greater reality.
This also means that academic freedom cannot be exalted at the expense of divine revelation. There must be symbiotic relationship that exists between the two dimensions of inquiry. On the one hand, freedom needs faith to be its guiding light and its safeguard, in order that the authenticity of this freedom may always be preserved. On the other hand, the recognition of divinely revealed truth must be explicated and deepened through the exercise of reason. To be truly free is to be truly open to both these dimensions of divine and reasoned truth. In this sense, faith is the guarantee of the authentic freedom so desired by reason. “There can be no reason apart from or in opposition to the truth...” (Veritatis splendor, 96). When either one of these two orders seek to function apart from each other, there is an absence of authentic freedom or real openness.
When academic freedom leads to a contradiction of the faith proclaimed by the Church, it compromises its own virtue of true freedom. True academic freedom implies even a willingness “to speak uncomfortable truths which do not please public opinion” but, nevertheless, are “necessary” in order “to safeguard the authentic good of society” (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, 32). If academic theology becomes a pathetic imitation of secular inquiry prevalent in many academic institutions and sacrifices the integrity of divine revelation, it loses its prophetic power in a world that exalts the infallibility of human reason, which is itself an unsustainable notion.
Actually, the common assumption that even secular intellectual life does not operate within certain boundaries constitutes a fallacy. Every intellectual community is regulated by its own rules of research and discovery. Theological thinkers should not be ashamed of the fact that theology itself is regulated by its own unique rules of engagement as set out by the community of faith; what more when it speaks of divinely revealed truth.
Perhaps the tension between faith and reason - and its profound implication upon the much treasured academic freedom - is best explained by the Holy Father himself in his statement regarding the Magisterium of the Church: “The Magisterium, rightly understood, is a humble service that makes possible true theology”.
The policing activity of the Vatican, together with its censure of dissident theological voices in the Church, is on all accounts a most sacred duty that exists to preserve the integrity of both faith and reason. Only then is authentic academic freedom upheld.
